True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 333: A Child Called Bullshit
Aired: 2023-11-13
Duration: 01:51:39


=== Nine Years of Silence (01:48) ===

[00:00:00]  Winter 1970, Daly City, California.
[00:00:04]  I'm alone.
[00:00:05]  I'm hungry and I'm shivering in the dark.
[00:00:07]  I sit on top of my hands at the bottom of the stairs in the garage.
[00:00:11]  My head is tilted backward.
[00:00:12]  My hands became numb hours ago.
[00:00:15]  My neck and shoulder muscles begin to throb, but that's nothing new.
[00:00:18]  I've learned to turn off the pain.
[00:00:20]  I am mother's prisoner.
[00:00:22]  I am nine years old and I've been living like this for years.
[00:00:25]  Every day it's the same thing.
[00:00:27]  I wake up from sleeping on an old army cot in the garage, perform the morning chores, and if I'm lucky, eat leftover breakfast cereal from my brother's bowls.
[00:00:35]  I run to school, steal food, return to the house, and am forced to throw up in the toilet bowl to prove that I didn't commit the crime of stealing any food.
[00:00:45]  I receive beatings or play another one of her games, perform afternoon chores, then sit at the bottom of the stairs until I'm summoned to complete the evening chores.
[00:00:54]  Then, and only if I have completed all of my chores on time, and if I have not committed any crimes, I may be fed a morsel of food.
[00:01:04]  My day ends only when mother allows me to sleep on the army cot, where my body curls up in my meek effort to retain any body heat.
[00:01:12]  The only pleasure in my life is when I sleep.
[00:01:14]  That's the only time I can escape my life.
[00:01:17]  I love to dream.
[00:01:41]  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Truanon Eye.
[00:01:46]  I am both mother and mother's prisoner.

=== Joke Structure Analysis (15:04) ===

[00:01:49]  My name is Bryce Belden.
[00:01:51]  I am actually mother, and my name is Liz.
[00:01:54]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:01:56]  And like Bryce said, this is Truanon.
[00:01:58]  Hello.
[00:01:59]  Hello, and welcome to our guest, Prisoner Thomas Morton.
[00:02:02]  Hello.
[00:02:04]  We are, we've got a lot to talk about today.
[00:02:07]  Yeah, I think the easiest way to kind of intro this discussion is to say that a while ago, Brace came to me and was like, I really want to do an episode on this book called A Child Called It.
[00:02:24]  And I have a friend who's like kind of obsessed with these like fake memoir, like the mass paperback fake memoirs that have doppled, I don't know what I want to say, dappled?
[00:02:35]  Dappled?
[00:02:36]  Dappled the last century, we'll say, of popular nonfiction slash literature, depending on who's.
[00:02:43]  Well, we'll get into nonfiction slash, yeah.
[00:02:46]  Yeah.
[00:02:48]  And there's so many different examples of it.
[00:02:50]  And then, like, amazing timing, because a scandal hit the Netflix, comedy, world.
[00:03:01]  And no, ladies and gentlemen, it was not Anthony Kumilla walking down the street and encountering someone from a different race, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:03:09]  It was an article in the New Yorker.
[00:03:12]  America's funniest magazine.
[00:03:14]  One of the crazy.
[00:03:16]  Who's the humor columnist that they have?
[00:03:19]  Is it not David Sederis?
[00:03:20]  Not David Sederis.
[00:03:21]  Woody Allen?
[00:03:22]  Does Woody Allen still write for them?
[00:03:23]  I don't know if Woody Allen's really writing from any magazine.
[00:03:26]  Hendrik Hertzberg is.
[00:03:27]  No, it's like you would, I'm sure there'll be a million comments saying who it is.
[00:03:31]  Jamie Sturber.
[00:03:32]  By the time you listen to this and comment telling me the actual name, I won't care anymore.
[00:03:36]  Most people just join the New Yorker because they want the funny little cartoon avatar.
[00:03:40]  Andy Borowitz.
[00:03:40]  Andy Borowitz.
[00:03:42]  Thank you, young Chomsky.
[00:03:43]  That was a real Jamie moment right there.
[00:03:46]  You know, like, Jamie, pull it up.
[00:03:48]  Liz.
[00:03:48]  What?
[00:03:48]  Don't get it.
[00:03:49]  Jamie, pull it up.
[00:03:50]  It's from Joe Rogan.
[00:03:51]  Jamie, pull that on the screen.
[00:03:53]  He knows what I'm talking about.
[00:03:55]  I had no idea what that was referencing.
[00:03:56]  Okay, well, never mind.
[00:03:57]  But I love to learn more about you and your listening habits.
[00:04:01]  The New Yorker, or as we call it, the New Dorker, because it's a magazine for nerds, put out a hit piece?
[00:04:08]  Takedown?
[00:04:09]  What do you think?
[00:04:10]  Hit piece?
[00:04:11]  Shit piece.
[00:04:12]  Shit piece.
[00:04:13]  A shit piece.
[00:04:16]  It's a hit page.
[00:04:16]  I think it's a shit piece.
[00:04:17]  Because I actually do think that I'm going to stand.
[00:04:19]  I'm going to, well, we can talk about this at the end of the episode, but I'm going to stand with Claire Malone, who's the writer with it.
[00:04:24]  Well, a shit piece would be you don't stand with her then, right?
[00:04:28]  Yeah.
[00:04:28]  And I'm saying, I don't think it was a shit piece.
[00:04:31]  Oh, you don't.
[00:04:32]  Oh, well, I think it was a hit piece.
[00:04:34]  Yeah.
[00:04:34]  I think it was a hit piece.
[00:04:35]  I think it was a targeted hit.
[00:04:37]  I think I don't think that she was necessarily wrong.
[00:04:41]  I think it was a hit piece.
[00:04:44]  Claire Malone.
[00:04:44]  I'm going to hit you with a fucking piece.
[00:04:46]  No?
[00:04:46]  Okay.
[00:04:46]  You would shoot someone with a piece.
[00:04:48]  But I wouldn't because I don't want to murder you.
[00:04:50]  I just want to hit you.
[00:04:51]  Well, speaking of murders, comedian Hassan Minaj, Nikki Minaj's husband, who is kind of who is Hassan?
[00:05:00]  He's like, he's kind of like a lefty comedian guy, right?
[00:05:07]  I guess.
[00:05:08]  I mean, he was the host of a show called Patriot Act, which was basically in the daily show/slash John Oliver kind of sit at a desk and explain the news, and it gets you to some sort of something important to learn about.
[00:05:25]  Oh, like it's some comedy, some news.
[00:05:27]  Like we do.
[00:05:28]  Like what we do.
[00:05:29]  Yes.
[00:05:29]  Or our friends at Chapo Trup House.
[00:05:32]  But for the TV, so different than what we do.
[00:05:35]  So, okay, yeah, no girls.
[00:05:37]  And actually, he was rumored, I mean, prior to this piece, rumored to be up for the daily show gig.
[00:05:44]  Uh-huh.
[00:05:44]  Yeah, I saw that they're running through hosts now, and they had the guy from the Breakfast Club hosting the Daily Show for a little bit.
[00:05:50]  Oh, literally went to the movie, not the show.
[00:05:53]  Oh, no.
[00:05:54]  Oh, well, that explains the difference between your culture and my culture.
[00:05:58]  But he was in the running to become host of The Daily Show, like you said.
[00:06:03]  And I believe this piece sort of dashed those hopes.
[00:06:08]  So has any of you guys actually seen his stand-up in here?
[00:06:12]  Anyone in the room seen a single second of it?
[00:06:14]  I never heard of this guy in my life.
[00:06:16]  I hadn't until this.
[00:06:17]  And then I did, for homework reasons, watch some clips.
[00:06:20]  And it's not my cup of tea.
[00:06:23]  No, you're kind of more like a, you, you're.
[00:06:26]  What am I, Brace?
[00:06:27]  Nope.
[00:06:28]  No, I'm just going to reel that sentence back in.
[00:06:31]  I would say your taste tends more towards the urban, like of comedy.
[00:06:35]  You know what I mean?
[00:06:36]  Like what, Brace?
[00:06:38]  I don't know.
[00:06:38]  This is how you describe it.
[00:06:40]  You know, I don't know.
[00:06:41]  This is how you yourself describe it.
[00:06:43]  But I would say it's more like a Liz at the Apollo situation rather than like Liz trying to learn some facts from the TV.
[00:06:50]  But in his comedy, I know that he uses purportedly real life events to make a both comedic, political, and emotional point, right?
[00:07:00]  Yeah, I mean, that was kind of the thrust of the whole New Yorker piece, that they were like, okay, this is a guy who has really leaned in to his personal experience as being sort of emblematic of, you know, broader points that he makes through his comedy about racism in America, about the, you know, about the police in America, so on and so forth.
[00:07:24]  This is a quote from the New Yorker.
[00:07:25]  He leans heavily on his own experience as an Asian American and Muslim American telling harrowing stories of law enforcement entrapment and personal threats.
[00:07:34]  So he's a comedian and a performer, and I guess you would say a writer for, you know, for that matter.
[00:07:40]  But he bases almost all of his performance on personal experiences, specifically ones having to do with racism.
[00:07:47]  So he like really leans into the personal memoir-esque anecdotes in order to kind of, one, establish his own authority on something and sort of guide the audience through a story in order to illustrate a kind of larger moral point, I would say, right?
[00:08:06]  Sounds hilarious, yeah.
[00:08:07]  Yeah, it totally sounds funny.
[00:08:09]  I mean, I think it's like...
[00:08:10]  What a great comedian.
[00:08:12]  Yeah, there's a lot of comedy that's like this now, I guess.
[00:08:15]  I love, I mean, there's one thing I love for my comedy.
[00:08:18]  It's a sense of harrowing, harrowing kind of morality.
[00:08:21]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  Yeah.
[00:08:22]  He like really kind of, I mean, he like, you know, uses PowerPoint presentations and really like, I mean, it feels like it's like.
[00:08:31]  One of the funniest modes of comedy.
[00:08:33]  Yeah.
[00:08:33]  But I mean, like, that, so he really does lean into that kind of style.
[00:08:36]  Yeah.
[00:08:37]  It's the daily show.
[00:08:38]  And so in this piece, you know, the problem is, and this is for the New Yorker, and it's just easy to quote them here on this, so I'm going to do that.
[00:08:46]  They write, they had been unable to confirm some of the stories that he had told on stage.
[00:08:53]  Hassan, for his part, he's quoted in the piece as saying, every story in my style is built around a seed of truth.
[00:08:59]  My comedy Arnold Palmer is 70% emotional truth, this happened, and then 30% hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction.
[00:09:09]  So this caused like a big stir, right?
[00:09:12]  Well, it's, yeah, which I thought was interesting to sort of like observe the backlash to that because I have always been under the impression that comedians are, well, I don't know if I would call it lying, but they're not like telling you the truth.
[00:09:29]  You know what I mean?
[00:09:30]  Like, unless like, you know, you're watching some guy be like, I've been on the apps again.
[00:09:34]  He's like, yeah, that's probably true.
[00:09:36]  But like, you know, like these long drawn-out stories that people tell about like, like Burt Kreischer, Liz's favorite comedian, has this story about how he like was involved in the mafia train robbery or whatever.
[00:09:49]  The machine story, right?
[00:09:50]  The machine story, which I've never watched.
[00:09:51]  It's does, I dislike, he's got a Brett Gelman-esque physique.
[00:09:56]  Yeah.
[00:09:57]  It's never mind, go on.
[00:09:59]  But he, but like, people don't actually think that's like true, right?
[00:10:03]  I'm like, maybe there's like some parts of it that are true, which I'm sure is for a lot of comedian stories.
[00:10:08]  But like, I've never been under the impression that like I'm going to a comedy show to do anything but like look at my phone in a sort of desultory way and then leave 15 minutes after it starts.
[00:10:18]  Well, like going back to his analogy, like aren't seeds something you want to remove from Lemonader Iced T?
[00:10:24]  Yeah.
[00:10:26]  True.
[00:10:27]  I think though that, and this is kind of the, the, I would say, part of the Claire Malone's argument, if she's making one, or the New Yorker's argument, whatever you want to say, is that Minhaj is like doing something different a little bit.
[00:10:43]  Yeah.
[00:10:43]  That saying that he's simply crafting jokes, even by his own admission, is like not sufficient to explain why audiences might feel a sense of betrayal finding out that his stories were, I think, more than embellished.
[00:11:00]  Yeah.
[00:11:02]  This is what they say.
[00:11:03]  You know, they run through in the piece several incidents that they claim are, you know, exaggerated, if not like outright fabricated.
[00:11:12]  So there's one story about a letter being sent to his home filled with white powder.
[00:11:17]  And this was the time during when Patriot Act, his special on Netflix, was being filmed.
[00:11:23]  And he had just done, and this is how he kind of frames it as he's telling this quote-unquote joke, I guess, if we want to say that's its joke.
[00:11:33]  So the framing of this story comes like as he, you know, he's saying, like, okay, we had just done segments on Jamal Khashoggi that perhaps he's basically intimating that maybe someone might be upset with.
[00:11:45]  Saudi Arabia is sending him an envelope of white powder.
[00:11:48]  I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that he's sort of framing it as he is dropping knowledge truth bombs that are dangerous to certain segments of society, right?
[00:11:58]  And he tells a story about how he opens this letter and white powder spills out onto his daughter.
[00:12:04]  He rushes her to the hospital in fear that it's anthrax, which it's not, obviously.
[00:12:10]  And he then gets admonished by his wife for not taking seriously the consequences that he says of like what he says on TV.
[00:12:18]  Like she's basically like, look, what you say about, you know, Khashoggi, I guess, or about, you know, I don't know, the Saudis or Yemen or whatever he's talking about, those have real consequences to your like real life, right?
[00:12:32]  And this is kind of the anecdote that he's telling.
[00:12:34]  It's like moralist tale, right?
[00:12:37]  There's another one where he figures out that a guy at a mosque in Sacramento when he's a kid growing up is actually an FBI informant.
[00:12:48]  He names this guy Brother Eric in the joke.
[00:12:52]  What's his name?
[00:12:52]  Brother Eric.
[00:12:53]  Can you say that more with like an accent?
[00:12:55]  And Minhaj basically decides, he's like, oh, I think this guy's an FBI informant, so I'm going to fuck with him.
[00:13:00]  Basically being like, oh, well, you know, I'm like about to get my pilot's license, like kind of like joking around, like kind of fucking around.
[00:13:07]  And then he says at a certain point, the police show up and slam Minhaj as he's like a young boy against the car.
[00:13:14]  And he experiences this like police brutality.
[00:13:17]  And it's a story about, you know, anti-Muslim bigotry and police surveillance in the wake of 9-11.
[00:13:25]  Yeah, I mean, mosques were hugely infiltrated.
[00:13:27]  Absolutely.
[00:13:27]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:28]  So the thing is that neither of those things happened the way Minhaj told them on stage, according to The New Yorker.
[00:13:35]  And this is, Minhaj insisted that though both stories were made up, they were based on emotional truth.
[00:13:43]  And I think maybe later on in the episode, we can get more or we can get back into that a little bit about that kind of phrase, emotional truth, which gets leaned on a lot by people who are accused of, I guess, embellishing certain things for storytelling purposes.
[00:14:00]  Yeah.
[00:14:02]  But she, Malone poses a really interesting question that can maybe be started off and why I kind of am behind the New Yorker on this.
[00:14:11]  And she says, when fibs are told to prove a social point rather than to elicit an easy laugh, does their moral weight change?
[00:14:20]  And I think that's like a really interesting kind of jumping off point.
[00:14:23]  I mean, I think, first of all, anytime you're adding a word to truth, like that's already a proof.
[00:14:28]  You're giving yourself away pretty badly.
[00:14:31]  You're already in the doghouse.
[00:14:33]  What was it that Colbert said called it, truthiness?
[00:14:36]  Truthiness.
[00:14:36]  Which he did so satirically, by the way.
[00:14:38]  He was talking about a condition, not like he was like leaning on it as his kind of gambit.
[00:14:43]  Yeah.
[00:14:44]  That seems tantamount to emotional truth as it, you know, as it related to.
[00:14:48]  2000s era, like Fox Media.
[00:14:50]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  Well, I mean, it's interesting because I think a lot of the sort of stories that you hear comedians tell are like lies, but like you kind of know that they are.
[00:14:59]  You know what I mean?
[00:15:00]  Like, yeah, like maybe if you're really stupid, you believe all of these things actually happened to whatever stand-up comedy you're fucking watching that night.
[00:15:08]  But like, obviously, they probably did not.
[00:15:10]  Or if they did, they're highly embellished to make them funny because real life rarely has this like very pat lesson-giving nature, right?
[00:15:20]  And I think that we all sort of have this, like, there's a consent to that that people, I don't know, give, where they're like, yeah, like, I understand this isn't true, but like, it's, it's, it's funny.
[00:15:33]  So, like, you know, I don't care, it doesn't matter.
[00:15:35]  Like, if the point is that it's a joke.
[00:15:37]  But I think where it gets, and that's not really an interesting conversation.
[00:15:41]  Like, if they'd just written like an article about, you know, whatever Carrot Top stand-up act isn't actually based in fact, no one gives a fuck, right?
[00:15:50]  But like, this.
[00:15:51]  That is a rubber chicken.
[00:15:53]  That is a rubber chicken.
[00:15:54]  And he's got the craziest dick line shit now.
[00:15:57]  What do they call it?
[00:15:58]  Come gutters.
[00:15:58]  Yeah.
[00:15:59]  Cum gutters.
[00:15:59]  Yeah, he's got the craziest.
[00:16:01]  They are called that.
[00:16:02]  Liz is not giving it happy.
[00:16:05]  There was a pre-cum gutters term for them, and I forget it now.
[00:16:07]  What was it?
[00:16:08]  You have to know, bro.
[00:16:10]  Where they it's the V. I think it might have been called the V. The V, these ones.
[00:16:15]  Carrot Top's V on his pelvic area is intense.
[00:16:20]  Anyways, an article in New Yorker about Carrot Top lying in his comedy said, No one gave a fuck about it.
[00:16:26]  But I think this one kind of set off a round of people talking about it, like is interesting to kind of think about because Minhaj wasn't doing this to like, you know, he wasn't just like telling a joke about an ex-girlfriend that like rejected him because he, you know, I don't know, did something stupid, but it's because of racism and specifically because of like anti-South Asian racism.
[00:16:51]  Well, and Carrot Top is funny, like above all else.

=== Confessions and True Stories (10:05) ===

[00:16:54]  What are the punchlines to these bits?
[00:16:56]  I don't know.
[00:16:56]  The menages that his daughter didn't die?
[00:16:59]  Like his baby daughter wasn't poisoned.
[00:17:01]  But that's why it's like a very, let's use the word punchline loosely, right?
[00:17:06]  Because it's sort of like the way that the quote-unquote jokes are structured is that you kind of laugh along the way until you get to the point that he's trying to make that you've like now learned at the end of the story.
[00:17:20]  And that one's not funny.
[00:17:21]  That's like something serious and real that now he's sort of illuminating as a kind of social phenomenon that maybe, you know, this experience in his life like well illustrates and we can all learn a little lesson here.
[00:17:34]  And so I do think the construction is a bit different, Which is sort of why it feels more like, it feels like this is like perfect for this conversation because it feels more like memoir than it feels like comedy.
[00:17:49]  Yeah.
[00:17:49]  You know what I mean?
[00:17:50]  Well, he's attempting to be the comedian as truth teller, but he's sort of bypassed the first part of that, which is the comedy.
[00:17:56]  Right.
[00:17:56]  Like I see this a lot with journalists, the kind of journalists who wouldn't, who would call themselves a journalist versus a reporter, say, or a columnist or something, something more like the Anglo-Saxon term, as like AP Style has it for you, versus the high-flutin Latinate term.
[00:18:13]  And, you know, especially like for me, kind of starting with the Bush era and stuff like that, this real kind of this repetition of the idea that to be a journalist is to speak truth to power was, it always struck me it's like there's there's a first job that you have to do, and that's speak truth or to report things or something.
[00:18:34]  Hopefully it raises to that level.
[00:18:37]  But when you run into the, you know, run into the situation, you're not paying your dues effectively.
[00:18:43]  Like, and it creates this weird sort of arena where everything is held, you know, held by the standard of its intentions.
[00:18:50]  And that I felt like reading about Minaj, he falls back on that where he's like, he's like, look, I'm trying to, you know, I'm up here fighting fucking racism and Islamophobia.
[00:19:00]  Like, so, you know, a couple eggs get broken.
[00:19:03]  I screw up a couple little facts.
[00:19:04]  My daughter didn't almost die from anthrax, you know, and you're, why are you nitpicking?
[00:19:10]  Right?
[00:19:10]  Yeah.
[00:19:11]  Yeah.
[00:19:11]  Although I'm going to, this would maybe be too much of a digression, but I don't know if the journalist's job is to tell truth.
[00:19:18]  Well, but I think it's to tell a story.
[00:19:21]  Yeah.
[00:19:21]  And it's to tell the story they want to tell, which is usually in there, I think, in the journalist's mind in service of some kind of truth.
[00:19:28]  But also a lot of eggs tend to get broken, including usually the people that the journalist is writing about.
[00:19:33]  A lot of omelets every day, yeah.
[00:19:34]  Yeah.
[00:19:35]  I always thought that to speak truth to power kind of accidentally revealed your audience, sort of like how about speaking truth to all of us.
[00:19:42]  Yeah.
[00:19:42]  Yeah.
[00:19:44]  To the working man.
[00:19:45]  Well, yeah, I mean, that brings to mind that Janet Malcolm book.
[00:19:48]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:19:50]  Which is definitely, I think, really is a really good illustration.
[00:19:53]  It's a short book if any of you guys are looking for something to read.
[00:19:56]  It's about 100 pages.
[00:19:57]  It's much better than some of the books we're going to be talking about today.
[00:19:59]  Very much so, yes.
[00:20:01]  Journalists and the murder, It's really good, but it sort of shows interviews from the journalist side.
[00:20:07]  And I think it makes a lot of sense.
[00:20:10]  But we were sort of talking the other day about kind of the history of this stuff.
[00:20:14]  I guess more what led up to the kind of memoirs that we'll be talking about a little later.
[00:20:21]  And I kept coming back to the phenomenon of confession magazines that I believe first started appearing in like the late 1800s in some form, but like really solidified during the early 20th century with like true, I think that the biggest one was called True Stories, which began in 1920.
[00:20:39]  And it's funny because I, you know, growing up, there was always sort of like a cultural touchstone to like where if you were like, you know, watching a movie that was based in the 1940s or whatever, whatever.
[00:20:48]  I mean, even True Detective takes its name from one of these style of confession magazines.
[00:20:54]  And there would be these magazines that are like, to the modern reader with the modern eye, you'd be like, oh, well, these are all obviously fake stories.
[00:21:01]  But at the time, we're very much sold as true.
[00:21:04]  And they were, you know, the 1920s and later is really when magazines became more widespread and like the lower classes started reading them essentially.
[00:21:15]  And so they were sort of marketed towards poor people, essentially.
[00:21:18]  And these are all these true romance stories.
[00:21:21]  These are all these true cowboy stories or these true war stories or something like that.
[00:21:25]  Also to teenagers.
[00:21:26]  Don't forget that at 15 and 16, a lot of people were already in the workplace and were technically adults.
[00:21:30]  Yeah.
[00:21:31]  And codified as teenagers.
[00:21:32]  But yeah.
[00:21:33]  And they would always kind of have these.
[00:21:35]  I mean, this became more solidified, especially as the publishing industry kind of got its legs more in the modern era.
[00:21:43]  But as moralistic stories, right?
[00:21:45]  Especially in the 30s through the 50s and 60s, I guess.
[00:21:51]  They would teach you that you'd have these sort of romance stories where a woman would go on her wayward, because women were big readers of these, would kind of like become a wayward youth and take off with this kind of bad boy.
[00:22:04]  And then she would learn her lesson and marry the preacher's son or whatever.
[00:22:09]  And it's sort of interesting because obviously they were more sophisticated ones aimed at the upper classes, but people who were reading these week after week after week would be like, well, there's no way these stories can actually all be true.
[00:22:23]  And it's, you know, I read some interviews with people who used to write for these and some kind of papers about these.
[00:22:29]  And it's like a lot of them did start maybe their first year with a lot of true stories.
[00:22:34]  And then the editors would just, of course, start to make them up because you need more content, but you also need content that fits a particularly moralistic storytelling pattern.
[00:22:44]  Right.
[00:22:45]  I mean, L. Ron Hubbard writes for these type of magazines, too.
[00:22:48]  Really?
[00:22:50]  To put the repute of the author's veracity really in focus there.
[00:22:56]  It's the, these are the, You know, by the 40s, these are the stock and trade of all the major sci-fi writers who come out of the war.
[00:23:05]  And like, I don't know about Bradbury, but Heinlein, Heinlein Hubbard, and the Big H's.
[00:23:15]  Oh, Azimo?
[00:23:16]  There's another.
[00:23:17]  I don't think it was Azima V. Who am I missing?
[00:23:19]  Heinlein, who was hanging out, like who was physically hanging out with them in Southern California.
[00:23:24]  Oh, Harlan Ellison, the other age.
[00:23:26]  Yes, sorry.
[00:23:26]  Yes.
[00:23:27]  Who's an interesting kind of person to bring in the mix here?
[00:23:30]  It's true.
[00:23:30]  I like him.
[00:23:33]  That these, you know, by this point, these are these are boys' magazines.
[00:23:37]  Yeah.
[00:23:39]  And they've got to compete with each other.
[00:23:41]  They're coming out on a regular schedule.
[00:23:42]  It's industrial writing, you know, this, you know, kind of the confession magazines you speak of and the whole idea of a of a press for for like the regular person as opposed to the, you know, middle or upper upper class person bound for college or whatever of disposable literature, really.
[00:23:59]  Yeah, like the like dime store Westerns and like detective stories and like tabloid newspapers, the crime sheets in Victorian England that they put out every day with that are crime illustrated.
[00:24:12]  yeah, illustrated crime names.
[00:24:13]  I forget um, the shit from hell's based on um, there there's this rush of um of yeah, just disposable literature all of a sudden and it's.
[00:24:26]  It's interesting how like the framing has to be like this is a true story, this really happened, because oftentimes, like some of them would be taken from like you know, kind of in, in the same way that like a Law And Order Svu episode will be like based on a NEW YORK POST story about you know some subway assault or something or you know whatever, the bling ring right, but it'll have to work in some sort of teen trend.
[00:24:49]  Exactly Ice Tea can explain as well.
[00:24:51]  Yes yes yeah, yeah.
[00:24:52]  Yeah, there'll be a marriage.
[00:24:54]  Yeah, and there'll have to be, but there'll have to be like a kind of well, maybe less of an svu, but like in in these sentences, like they'll have to sort of like impugn it with the morals of the day right, and like that's they.
[00:25:04]  They sort of become like really um, like Aesop fables yes, they become kind of fables yeah, and and the way like when you talk about it like that, it makes it seem kind of programmatic, like they were that their editors there and it's like remember, don't forget, you know what's the moral remember, at you know paragraph three, you should be introducing your thesis for the moral, but it's.
[00:25:23]  It's like that's not how the these get written.
[00:25:26]  They get written by people under crazy deadlines writing, you know, paid by the word, have to do like 10 a week or whatever.
[00:25:32]  Yeah, and it's just a natural, like it's the natural rhythm into which writing and storytelling seems to, seems to sort of fall.
[00:25:41]  Like we don't, you know, Aesop's Fables is the moral is structured so that the moral just hits you in the face with it.
[00:25:50]  Like moral literature is like all over the map, like right up until, you know, right up until the end of World War II and postmodernism shifts things around a little bit.
[00:26:01]  You know, there's highbrow moral literature.
[00:26:03]  Yeah.
[00:26:04]  Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan.
[00:26:07]  Mixes of these, like in the Canterbury tales, where you get the tales that are very upstanding and moral and then get completely inverted by the middle or lower class tale tellers.
[00:26:17]  You know, you get like the poker up the ass.
[00:26:20]  And these sort of things, it's not even a genre of literature.
[00:26:24]  It's a mode.
[00:26:24]  It's a mode of human kind of like storytelling and expression.
[00:26:28]  What's the point of this?
[00:26:30]  Yeah.
[00:26:30]  Everything having a point.
[00:26:32]  A point or a punchline is usually sort of, if there's a division between these two things.
[00:26:37]  It's interesting to me that there was an immediate recognition of the need for these to be, I mean, obviously, probably in terms of boosting sales, but these stories need to be true, right?
[00:26:50]  Like if you're reading a story about white slavers, which was a really big, popular, popular form of this.
[00:26:57]  They hated Chinese with their opium diggers.

=== Pornographic Quality Revelations (04:59) ===

[00:26:59]  Exactly.
[00:26:59]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:27:00]  Like if you were reading like a white slaver story in 1920, like you needed it to be, at least tell you it was true, because if not, then you're essentially just reading pornography, right?
[00:27:11]  Like you're reading, you're reading either torture or just regular sexual racial points.
[00:27:17]  I mean, that was a huge part of the kind of like captivity tales or like the stories about, you know, the girl who was raised, half Indian, half white, like all that like create, which I don't know, like Liz Warren probably read and was like, oh, I got a great idea.
[00:27:32]  And then you know what?
[00:27:33]  That girl became a senator.
[00:27:34]  Yeah.
[00:27:35]  And that's the moral of that tale.
[00:27:37]  Or, I mean, yeah, all over the place.
[00:27:42]  It was like a way to kind of, I guess, like you're saying, a sort of way to get those jollies out, but then not to feel so bad about it, I guess.
[00:27:51]  And also to reinforce a lot of horrible, horrible stereotypes.
[00:27:56]  Like beyond law and order and stuff like that, there's modern day examples of this just being spit out by like, especially like that weird fringe right-wing media that's kind of started to emerge, kind of came out of Christian cinema, where there's like Daily Wire cinema.
[00:28:09]  Yeah, I forget the names, but there's the Run Hide Fleet, Run Hide Fight.
[00:28:16]  Yes.
[00:28:17]  The Columbine story that really leans hard into the action and the gore of it.
[00:28:22]  The Hunter Biden story, which was that called the Hunter Biden story?
[00:28:25]  I forget.
[00:28:26]  I know it's like it was just called like Hunter or something.
[00:28:29]  I never watched it because a bunch of my friends watched it together.
[00:28:33]  And I was, I believe I had COVID-19 when that happened.
[00:28:38]  And so I wasn't able to.
[00:28:40]  Better watch in a group.
[00:28:41]  Hunter a Biden story, maybe.
[00:28:44]  Horrible title.
[00:28:46]  Which, oh, Myson Hunter.
[00:28:48]  I'm sorry.
[00:28:49]  Thank you.
[00:28:49]  That's my hunter.
[00:28:50]  With Son Hunter.
[00:28:52]  Wants her face from Star Wars Gina Carino.
[00:28:54]  Yeah.
[00:28:55]  The Council.
[00:28:56]  We mentioned her in a previous episode.
[00:28:58]  I think everyone thought we were talking about Xena Warrior Princess.
[00:29:01]  Lucy Lawless.
[00:29:02]  Part of a continuum there, part of a lineage, I feel like.
[00:29:05]  You know what?
[00:29:05]  Our listeners would, they got very upset about it.
[00:29:07]  They got very upset about it.
[00:29:08]  They were defending Lucy Lawless.
[00:29:11]  But here's my thing.
[00:29:11]  I'm Law and Order.
[00:29:13]  Yeah.
[00:29:13]  Lucy Lawless.
[00:29:14]  But that's why.
[00:29:15]  I can't think of someone worse.
[00:29:16]  That's why the two of you together would.
[00:29:18]  Oh my God.
[00:29:19]  That'd be a real, yeah, that'd be a real Startski and Hutch.
[00:29:22]  My son Hunter is giving me like my left foot.
[00:29:26]  My son Hunter.
[00:29:27]  He's simple, but he means well.
[00:29:29]  Swing blade.
[00:29:30]  Yeah.
[00:29:32]  Yes.
[00:29:33]  But it's, I mean, the funny part of that movie is that it's, you know, it's very obviously drugged.
[00:29:39]  Oh, Gina Carina, by the way, plays a Secret Service agent who's still attached to the Bidens, who's the kind of Greek narrator of everything, but is just like, you're never going to believe what this guy's up to.
[00:29:51]  Like over her shoulder.
[00:29:51]  She's speaking directly into the camera, has one of the worst fitting suits on I've ever seen, which immediately betrays the level of production value that they put into this.
[00:30:00]  Oh, I want to see the suit.
[00:30:01]  But so they're like, oh, you're going to be disgusted by, I think I just stole it from Pirate Bear or whatever it's called these days.
[00:30:10]  But, you know, obviously the whole thing is supposed to be like the depravity that this guy has gotten up to, presumably, I guess, on the public dime or because he's related to the president, blah, blah, blah.
[00:30:21]  And then they, and then they depict it, and they depict it with hilarious mistakes throughout it.
[00:30:26]  Like this is a movie made by people who have very clearly have very little experience with drugs.
[00:30:33]  Yeah.
[00:30:33]  He's smoking.
[00:30:34]  At one point, he's smoking crack out of a weed pipe, which I guess you could do.
[00:30:41]  Sort of really do.
[00:30:42]  But no way.
[00:30:43]  But also, is that, do they make, do they talk about that, or do you think that was also low production, that was the same thing?
[00:30:50]  Or like that was on purpose?
[00:30:51]  There were so many of them.
[00:30:53]  I kept a, shit, I might actually have it.
[00:30:55]  I kept a list of weird things they did with drugs.
[00:30:58]  I mean, there was some classic stuff that could be in any movie where he just has like this nondescript bottle of pills that look like that.
[00:31:05]  Yeah.
[00:31:05]  You know, the pieces in Dr. Mario.
[00:31:06]  Those are so good.
[00:31:08]  And he's, you know, like, throwing them in his mouth, like, all flustered.
[00:31:14]  He cuts lines of Coke and then does one and then just wipes away all the, like, the mountain of Coke.
[00:31:20]  Which was sort of like.
[00:31:22]  Man, yeah.
[00:31:23]  Does it show?
[00:31:24]  But he's like having sex a lot and like it's like sweating the whole fucking time.
[00:31:31]  There is a sort of like pornographic quality to the I feel like some of the I mean they put out listen I have I'm gonna say probably two or three dozen pictures of Hunter Biden naked in various states.
[00:31:47]  Didn't they introduce that on the floor of Congress?
[00:31:48]  He's in the official congressional record.
[00:31:50]  His penis is in the congressional record.
[00:31:52]  And it's like, yeah, there is a certain like pornographic element to it for sure.

=== Daytime TV's Dark Side (03:10) ===

[00:31:58]  Of course.
[00:31:58]  Yeah.
[00:31:58]  And the moral sort of justifies it.
[00:32:00]  I think very much, and especially, you know, with the books we're discussing to get in there.
[00:32:06]  There's like a classic figure from my childhood, which is like the little old lady who sits and watches daytime TV and then like calls her friend to be like, can you believe how shameless these women on these shows are?
[00:32:20]  Like it's filthy, Agnes, you know?
[00:32:23]  But who sits there and watches it and watches it and watches it with, you know, but is against it.
[00:32:29]  Well, it's can live with themselves and go to church and be the upstanding person they are because, you know, because they're doing this, you know, not to enjoy it.
[00:32:39]  They do it every fucking day.
[00:32:41]  They clearly enjoy it, but they're on the other side of, you know.
[00:32:47]  They're on the other side of those battle lines that are being created in there.
[00:32:50]  Yeah.
[00:32:50]  Yeah.
[00:32:51]  And the moral and the moral stance functions to like allow people access to these sorts of worlds.
[00:32:56]  Well, it's interesting to bring up sort of daytime TV because, you know, that was that's sort of a kind of continuation of the confessional magazine, right?
[00:33:05]  And the tabloid, yeah.
[00:33:06]  And it's, yeah, yeah.
[00:33:06]  It's basically just tabloid video.
[00:33:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:09]  To like have, you know, I'm serially addicted to having sex with 80-year-old women.
[00:33:16]  And I bring that up because I know a guy who was on Jerry Springer.
[00:33:22]  I think it was for that one.
[00:33:24]  I've known a few people who were, I believe, actually the guy from the locust at the same time.
[00:33:29]  I was going to say, yeah.
[00:33:30]  The guy from the, I didn't know him, but I knew that.
[00:33:32]  They pretended to be gay, or he pretended to be gay with someone else from Gravity Records.
[00:33:35]  Right.
[00:33:37]  But one of them had a girlfriend who found out so they fought each other.
[00:33:40]  That was something that Sally Jesse Raphael was like very upset about, getting kind of roped into, because she was like a real journalist or like thought of herself as a real journalist.
[00:33:50]  And when she was doing daytime in that era, she was really pushed by her producers to do more Springer-style TV because get the bad teens on, get the crackheads on, whatever the fuck is on these shows.
[00:34:07]  Cash me out, cash me outside.
[00:34:09]  Yeah, but I'm talking, but 80s version.
[00:34:11]  So whatever that was.
[00:34:14]  Mostly club kids and goths.
[00:34:16]  Yeah, there was like a lot of people.
[00:34:16]  And then gay people who are like their own exotic kind of bandwidth.
[00:34:19]  Right, right.
[00:34:21]  Yeah.
[00:34:21]  Whatever the like weird safari is they were putting up on on daytime TV for the housewives at home.
[00:34:27]  But like she gave an interview, this was not that long ago.
[00:34:31]  I think it was in New York Magazine, maybe, where she just was very upset about how it all turned out and felt very betrayed herself by her own producers for kind of like pushing her in that direction.
[00:34:45]  that is what was, I mean, selling, you know, Oprah included, right?
[00:34:50]  She's the kind of grand dom of all of this.
[00:34:52]  Right.
[00:34:52]  And she had the gravitas that, you know, kind of gets shaved away over the course of the 90s.
[00:34:57]  I was thinking about that period as sort of like the rise of the producer versus the like, versus the anchor woman or reporter or figurehead, you know, running the show, whoever's name is on it.

=== Ask Alice About Her Inspiration (15:33) ===

[00:35:09]  Right.
[00:35:09]  Kind of ceases to run the show.
[00:35:11]  Couldn't possibly because there's just so many moving parts and they're doing a daily, you know, or four days a week kind of thing.
[00:35:17]  And then that leads us kind of more or less directly into reality TV where you don't even need the figurehead who's a supposed or a former supposed journalist or a journalist or whatever.
[00:35:30]  And you can just find some schmucks off the street who you're not even paying to run around and do whatever.
[00:35:35]  Well, Oprah herself actually appears in a bit of, I don't know, part of the story about one of these memoirs that we want to talk about.
[00:35:44]  So maybe we should talk about some of these books.
[00:35:47]  This whole genre that we were kind of like focusing on, this sort of memoir, the like fake memoir, I don't know what else to call it.
[00:35:54]  Fake memoir.
[00:35:55]  Yeah, it's a fake memoir.
[00:35:56]  It's a lie memoir.
[00:35:58]  Yeah, it's a French word, memoir.
[00:36:00]  Oh my God.
[00:36:01]  I'm sorry.
[00:36:02]  How would you like memoir?
[00:36:04]  Yeah, sorry that I was raised with a little bit of culture.
[00:36:08]  So the fake memoir, I mean, you mentioned the kind of how the confessional magazines, you know, kind of geared towards like young boys and those being these kind of like tales that really, you know, all these old sci-fi readers were kind of, or writers were sort of like feeding.
[00:36:25]  And that makes all the sense.
[00:36:26]  But it really comes into its own when it starts targeting the teenage girl.
[00:36:31]  Uh-huh.
[00:36:31]  For sure.
[00:36:32]  There was a big one that was very that even I think I read when I was a teen called Go Ask Alice.
[00:36:41]  Oh, yeah.
[00:36:42]  Hugely.
[00:36:43]  Yeah, I remember that one being like.
[00:36:44]  Maybe we should start with this one.
[00:36:45]  They taught that at my high school as nonfiction in this is like 1999 or so.
[00:36:52]  So it's, you know, first of all, it's a 30-year-old book by that point.
[00:36:55]  But it's also like it's also completely made up.
[00:36:59]  Yeah.
[00:37:00]  So wait, what?
[00:37:00]  So give our listeners a little rundown.
[00:37:02]  What is Go Ask Alice?
[00:37:03]  So Go Ask Alice is the classic like teen drug tragedy book.
[00:37:08]  It's where we get the great line, another day, another blowjob, where Another Day, Another Blowjob?
[00:37:16]  Yeah.
[00:37:17]  Tomorrow and they didn't even, they tried to teach me the Odyssey, and then I had to go to an alternative school.
[00:37:22]  We didn't even get to read this.
[00:37:23]  Well, this was for, I think, like a level down.
[00:37:26]  We had like a three-tier sort of, you know, sort of metropolis-esque structure to our school.
[00:37:33]  And this was not what they were teaching the like college track kids.
[00:37:37]  Although I guess everybody was kind of a college track kid.
[00:37:38]  Anyway, But so Alice is not the name of the supposed written by Anonymous.
[00:37:43]  Go ask Alice.
[00:37:44]  A teenage diary.
[00:37:45]  The hacker.
[00:37:48]  And now a Twitter account.
[00:37:50]  Yeah.
[00:37:51]  Oh.
[00:37:53]  You guys got me good.
[00:37:56]  I keep because we're this whole discussion kind of verges on hoaxing.
[00:38:01]  I keep waiting for the shoe to drop with you guys.
[00:38:03]  Like, what am I, you know?
[00:38:04]  We're not checking.
[00:38:05]  This hoax.
[00:38:05]  Yeah.
[00:38:06]  When the walls will fall down.
[00:38:07]  Like the Japanese.
[00:38:08]  God, I hope they don't.
[00:38:11]  Nathan Fielder is about to walk through the door.
[00:38:12]  Don't worry about it.
[00:38:13]  Okay, I would not go to that.
[00:38:16]  Anyway, it's, you know, it's purported to be the diary of this teen girl who took one hit of acid, and then that led to her, you know, basically trying every other drug within a phenomenally short period of time, having sex with guys,
[00:38:31]  getting raped by guys, and then ultimately dying, at which point the diary is handed over from her parents to its editor, a woman named Beatrice Sparks, who lives, I believe in Provo, Utah.
[00:38:46]  Maybe not at that period of time.
[00:38:47]  She's from kind of like Idaho, Utah.
[00:38:49]  She's a Mormon housewife, basically, who comes into this diary and then shops it around, except that there is no provenance to it.
[00:38:58]  When asked, she is never able to reproduce the original diary.
[00:39:03]  There's evidence that she submitted this diary as a manuscript with a different title to Art Link Letters publishing house after, you know, his famously, I think his daughter, his daughter's friend jumps out a window on acid and he goes, Art Link Letter goes like way hard against Acid.
[00:39:20]  And Sparks is like, oh, perfect opportunity.
[00:39:22]  Right?
[00:39:23]  And it may be, and it may be the source of her inspiration for making this, but it takes off.
[00:39:30]  It's huge.
[00:39:31]  She, you know, I think she was a little miffed that it ended up being, like, her name didn't make it to the cover of a lot of the early editions.
[00:39:39]  That as editor, she was somewhere on, you know.
[00:39:43]  Yeah, on the copyright page or the title page or whatever.
[00:39:45]  It was, you know, they stuck with by anonymous on there.
[00:39:50]  And it's a hit.
[00:39:51]  Like, it's huge.
[00:39:53]  It really, you know, and it makes its way into schools really quick for.
[00:39:58]  Which is pretty crazy.
[00:39:59]  I mean, it's like, even for something to be like so popular, for then it to be taught in schools, it's like to make that jump.
[00:40:06]  Like imagine that jump now.
[00:40:08]  It would be so bizarre.
[00:40:10]  But it really was.
[00:40:11]  I mean, I remember, I mean, I went to a Catholic school, but I remember being shown it as a sort of like, I mean, like, they're like, oh, we're, like, it wasn't taught to us, but it was like available.
[00:40:25]  And if you wanted to read, if you wanted to talk to anyone about it, they were available for you to talk to them.
[00:40:29]  Yeah.
[00:40:30]  Whole shelf full of copies.
[00:40:31]  Yeah.
[00:40:34]  Anyway, after it's a hit, she has a second book, which is a legitimate, like a family, also in Utah, whose son committed suicide and he kept a journal, comes to her and is like, hey, like, you know, hey, we know about you through go ask Alice.
[00:40:51]  Like, we'd like, we'd like to, you know, if you want it, to give you our son's journal.
[00:40:56]  His name was Alden.
[00:40:57]  Shoot, I forget his last name.
[00:40:58]  His name was Alden.
[00:41:00]  And she, you know.
[00:41:02]  explains that she's going to like change names and stuff like that.
[00:41:04]  But she basically rewrites the whole thing.
[00:41:08]  I think they give her, or when Alden's family kind of looked through the finished product, they recognized like 20 out of the 200 at some odd entries as being the actual diary pages.
[00:41:21]  And most of the rest of it is just completely made up.
[00:41:25]  And it goes from the real diary, which is about a kid who was kind of struggling with depression and was interested in kind of like Eastern philosophy and may have screwed around a little bit with some drugs, into a kid who gets dragged into the occult and is sacrificing cats and basically like loses his soul to Satan and to a very like kind of Mormon housewife version of Satan.
[00:41:47]  Yeah.
[00:41:48]  You know, with this very structured organization of Satanists who've just, you know, are waiting around the corner to pick kids up from the second they, you know, from the second they like pop a Benny.
[00:42:02]  A tab.
[00:42:03]  Or tab up.
[00:42:04]  Yeah.
[00:42:06]  Go on a trip.
[00:42:08]  Anyways, and it comes out as Jay's journal and there's the family raises a fucking stink about it, but it never really gets out of Utah.
[00:42:14]  And it, you know, it discredits her locally, but it doesn't, it doesn't really make national press.
[00:42:22]  And she kind of goes, like, she doesn't have another book until the 90s, but it just doesn't, doesn't have an effect on her, you know, her reputation.
[00:42:33]  It doesn't knock Go Ask Alice off the bookshelves of school libraries or anything like that.
[00:42:40]  But she comes back into the picture in the 90s and writes, I think, seven more diaries.
[00:42:46]  Although one isn't a diary, one is she is supposed transcripts from clinical thing, right?
[00:42:55]  She claims she was a psychologist and she had a psychological practice in some nondescript city, which sounds like New York, has a 92nd Street.
[00:43:03]  Like a gang.
[00:43:04]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:43:05]  This is a book called Almost Lost, which is about a teen kind of runaway who gets involved in a street gang.
[00:43:12]  They meet at some storm drain.
[00:43:14]  It feels like she had just watched Ninja Turtles, basically, to write this thing.
[00:43:19]  And then the street gang rules the school and makes everybody bow down before them in the hallways.
[00:43:25]  Yeah, like a genuflection.
[00:43:26]  And they even call it a genuflection, which is like, this is a 15-year-old kid who's in a street gang.
[00:43:31]  Genuflecting to the Wanderers.
[00:43:33]  Being like, today's we gonna we gonna make them genuck to us the hapoons, you know?
[00:43:39]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:43:40]  It's this bizarre, like, and this is, um, she writes one about AIDS, which I love, called It Happened to Nancy.
[00:43:47]  Nancy got.
[00:43:49]  Well, I forget if her name's.
[00:43:51]  No, her name is Nancy in the book.
[00:43:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:53]  She goes, she goes to a, she starts her diary the day she's going to a Garth Brooks concert.
[00:43:59]  There is a wild brawl in the middle of this.
[00:44:02]  of said concert, which is in, I think, somewhere outside of Greenville, South Carolina, supposedly.
[00:44:08]  And she gets separated from her friends and is like having a freak out.
[00:44:13]  I think she's supposed to be 14 or 15 in the diary.
[00:44:17]  And a young gentleman comes over and offser, you know, offers her help finding her, getting back to her friends, makes her laugh or whatever.
[00:44:27]  And she either gets his number or he figures out where she goes to middle or high school.
[00:44:31]  I forget.
[00:44:31]  And she starts a slight dalliance with this guy, which lasts like two or three encounters before he graphically rapes her and gives her AIDS, which she later discovers.
[00:44:43]  And it turns out this guy's like in, who claimed he was in high school is in his late 20s and is a serial rapist who's been hitting middle schools and high schools throughout South Carolina.
[00:44:54]  I guess near, maybe near the research triangle, I forget.
[00:44:58]  And like first thing she does is what any teenage, well, you were brought up Catholic.
[00:45:04]  I wasn't brought up Catholic, but I don't know.
[00:45:05]  No, no, no, no, you went to Catholic school.
[00:45:06]  I was going to say the first thing she does is call a nun to make sure that she has not committed a mortal sin versus a venal sin.
[00:45:15]  This is the night of the rape.
[00:45:17]  Okay.
[00:45:18]  And then later she has to go to a doctor because she has AIDS.
[00:45:21]  And then there's a funny thing that Beatrice Sparks does is she starts writing herself into these books.
[00:45:25]  Like at the end of the diary, Nancy is like, good, like, I've got amazing news.
[00:45:31]  Like, my, she goes to live with her aunt and she's like, my aunt knows this amazing woman named Dr. Sparks.
[00:45:38]  She's like, she actually helped edit that book, Go Ask Alice, which I read when I was 12.
[00:45:43]  If your doctor's name is Dr. Sparks, you got to get the fuck out of there, man.
[00:45:46]  Nothing good is happening.
[00:45:47]  No, not at all.
[00:45:49]  You know, I think that the genre of, like, found diary – I mean, first of all, there's obviously – The Hitler Diaries.
[00:45:57]  Well, there's that.
[00:45:58]  But what I'm going to say is that there's the, when we talk about the pornographic element, the found teenage girl diary is obviously its own, has its own kind of pornographic vibe to it that's quite classic in form.
[00:46:16]  But also, I think Even outside of that, the sort of like, oh, we just found this diary and this is telling this story was sort of like a classic trope in these types of moralist kind of literature, if we want to call it that.
[00:46:34]  And then at some point it shifts into just memoir, like person writing their own story.
[00:46:40]  It's no longer, yeah, because I mean, Sparks is inventing people.
[00:46:42]  Yeah, like there's no longer this sort of distance of the sort of like artifact that's found.
[00:46:48]  And it's sort of like now we're inventing our own stories.
[00:46:51]  And after Sparks experiments with actually having a real, you know, or a formerly living subject and using a diary, like the last seven books, like there's no information on anybody in them.
[00:47:02]  You can't really peg down where they take place.
[00:47:04]  She's accent, you know, in the AIDS one, Nancy lives in South Carolina, but her friend sneaks out of her house to go to a park in Utah with her boyfriend, which I think was just like they didn't, she was going to replace that with something in South Carolina, but the editor never caught it.
[00:47:17]  There's just all these tells.
[00:47:18]  It's really sloppy, like, and it's, and if you read, like, I think I told you, if you just read two of them back to back, you're like, these are the same person.
[00:47:27]  Clearly written by the same boy.
[00:47:28]  There's so many like really distinctive, like tics of the style and like word use that like one is funny to think of, like a 14 or 15 year old boy or girl saying, but also it's just like.
[00:47:42]  It's like there's no way these, you know two people, these two teenagers, separated 20 years apart, are using the same weird made-up slang terms like it's the groats.
[00:47:51]  You know no people yeah, it's not.
[00:47:53]  But I mean, things come out 20 years.
[00:47:56]  It's the groats is good or bad.
[00:47:58]  I think it's good.
[00:47:58]  Yeah, that's, that's from the 70s.
[00:48:00]  Okay, it's just nancy.
[00:48:01]  Okay, we're gonna flip it.
[00:48:02]  Yeah, and so it's the groats means no, it's bad, because groats sounds bad, sounds like groat is a byproduct of oats.
[00:48:08]  Right groats, are they the better one?
[00:48:10]  It kind of like curds in a whey.
[00:48:12]  You know that they're, they're all they're, they're byproducts of milk manufacturers.
[00:48:18]  If my man said that's the oats, i'd be like oh yeah, I think it's gross.
[00:48:22]  Like, oh yeah, I met this, this cute girl.
[00:48:24]  She's the groats.
[00:48:25]  I'd be like, oh man, what's wrong?
[00:48:27]  What's kind of goiter does she have?
[00:48:29]  Yeah, but what are those welts?
[00:48:32]  But it's the groats is 70s slang.
[00:48:34]  So this may you know, maybe the context you know.
[00:48:38]  I always think context is king, like it really helps explain that um the 90s it's, It's more stuff, like not to bring back Nancy with AIDS, but she calls everything Maggie and Mag, which I think is short for Magnificent.
[00:48:52]  Which I think I think Sparks maybe read somebody talk about talking about well, I think my guess, and what I love about these like weird, very clearly fictitious books is trying to figure out exactly how the lies work and where they come from.
[00:49:10]  My guess on Mag is that she heard somebody, like a Smiths fan, calling something terrific.
[00:49:17]  And she was like, oh, that's what kids do.
[00:49:19]  They just take the first part of a word.
[00:49:21]  They just abbreve.
[00:49:21]  Yeah, they mean, to be fair, people do be abbreviate.
[00:49:27]  People do be abbreviate.
[00:49:28]  I mean, she's not wrong.
[00:49:29]  It's just like there's something, it's, you know, it's that weird thing where it's like, you know, is this jazz?
[00:49:34]  And you're like, well, it isn't, but I can't explain why exactly they're wrong.
[00:49:38]  It's like, you didn't do it.
[00:49:39]  It didn't work.
[00:49:40]  Well, to me, jazz is all about the notes that you don't play.
[00:49:43]  Same with slang.
[00:49:44]  Slang is all about the words.
[00:49:45]  You don't have to play notes all the time.
[00:49:46]  Slang is about all of the letters that you don't use in the word.
[00:50:01]  So another one of these books that you guys wanted to talk about was something called A Child Called It, which I had actually never heard of.
[00:50:09]  You never saw that on like a supermarket impulse by Rack?
[00:50:12]  Like next to the Inquirer.
[00:50:14]  The Reader's Digest.
[00:50:14]  Or next to the Reader's Digest.
[00:50:16]  I'm sure it was like at my dentist office when I was a kid.
[00:50:19]  Its shape, it is the exact format of Reader's Digest.
[00:50:22]  Let me tell you about my first encounter with a child called It is when I was in monarch school when I got sent away to like a kind of, well, listeners of our game series will remember, but I got sent away to this kind of reformed school, I guess you could call it.

=== Child Called It (02:39) ===

[00:50:42]  And I remember specifically two books that I read because I read them back to back.
[00:50:47]  You were only allowed to read the books that they had on this one shelf there.
[00:50:50]  And so it's like you couldn't like import your own or anything like that.
[00:50:53]  It was like you had to read the books that they had.
[00:50:55]  And I read A Day in the Life of Ivan Donisevich.
[00:51:02]  And actually I read Gulag Archipelago there, which is also, I will tell you this, that's another, let's say, let's call that maybe a little bit of autofiction on both of those.
[00:51:12]  And at least according to Selzy Nitstein's wife.
[00:51:16]  And I read A Child Called It.
[00:51:19]  And I remember reading Day in the Life of Ivan Donisevic in a Child Called It basically back to back and being like, dude, this guy had it way worse than Ivan Donisevich, man.
[00:51:29]  Like this six-year-old boy is, and I remember being like, because, you know, 14 years old and like, I suppose, like, in comparison to some kids, I was kind of a worldly 14-year-old, but not really.
[00:51:42]  But I could still like think, I'm like, well, I think if you drank bleach, you'd die.
[00:51:48]  And I remember like reading several instances in the book, and I was like, there's no way.
[00:51:53]  You know what I mean?
[00:51:54]  Like, I understand that child abuse is certainly a horrible endemic thing.
[00:52:00]  People do horrible things to kids.
[00:52:01]  But I'm like, these specific incidents that he recounts are almost comically absurd.
[00:52:08]  And I was always in my head.
[00:52:09]  I was like, I don't know, man.
[00:52:10]  Like, there's something that seems weird about this book.
[00:52:13]  And then when I got out and later, when I got access to the internet, I realized that the book is essentially, you know, it is basically this guy's tale of his early life when he was a child who was not named anything, but it.
[00:52:29]  What?
[00:52:30]  Well, you know, like how your parents give you a name, right?
[00:52:33]  That's the premise of the book.
[00:52:34]  That's where the title comes from.
[00:52:35]  I only have a lot of things.
[00:52:36]  I'm just going to say I skimmed it.
[00:52:38]  Obviously, I do my homework, but I did skim it.
[00:52:41]  But the idea is that his name that his mom gave him was it.
[00:52:45]  Well, no, she reverts to calling it.
[00:52:47]  She reverts to calling him it.
[00:52:48]  He was originally born Dave Pelzer.
[00:52:51]  I suppose Dave Pelzer is the last name.
[00:52:53]  Davy David.
[00:52:54]  David Pelzer.
[00:52:56]  But his mother goes to dislike him so much that she refers to him as it.
[00:53:05]  And she depersonalized him.
[00:53:07]  She depersonalizes him and takes his name away.
[00:53:10]  Probably in order so that she could commit the abuse.
[00:53:12]  Okay, makes sense.
[00:53:13]  Go on.
[00:53:14]  Part and parcel.
[00:53:15]  Yeah.
[00:53:15]  And it's always stayed with me because I actually stole a copy of it from Monarch.

=== Why His Mother Called Him 'It (15:31) ===

[00:53:21]  And then it was at, and listen, I've been in a million little pieces of style, a couple of institutions my life.
[00:53:30]  And it has been a mainstay in basically, not all of them, but multiple of them.
[00:53:36]  And every time I see it, I'm always like, yes, they have a child called it because it's so like, it's supposed to be this really inspiring tale.
[00:53:42]  But when you read it, you're like, this just doesn't seem real.
[00:53:45]  And it turns out it's maybe not.
[00:53:47]  Well, it's also way more graphic than, you know, I would see it at old ladies' houses.
[00:53:52]  I think my grandma had a copy.
[00:53:54]  Or again, on Superman.
[00:53:56]  It does feel very grandma-coded.
[00:53:57]  At the supermarket.
[00:53:58]  Check out it.
[00:53:59]  It has a fucking angel on the cover holding up.
[00:54:02]  And like in this kid with his unfortunate bowl cut on it.
[00:54:06]  I know part of the abuse.
[00:54:08]  The child model they used for the cover of a child called.
[00:54:11]  Oh, I wonder where he's at.
[00:54:13]  He and the Nevermind.
[00:54:14]  I was about to say they should hang out or have a band hook up.
[00:54:17]  They should both write memoirs.
[00:54:19]  Oh, yeah.
[00:54:20]  Memoir Nation.
[00:54:23]  So I first read it because it got thrown out a window and hit me on the head on Collier Street.
[00:54:29]  Yeah.
[00:54:30]  Someone threw a child called It at you.
[00:54:33]  I don't know if it was at me.
[00:54:34]  Like, I think I might have just been in the right place at the right time, you know?
[00:54:39]  But I got bonked in the head with my original copy of a child.
[00:54:44]  And you were like, well, now's the time.
[00:54:46]  Yeah, I'd seen it.
[00:54:47]  I'd seen it forever.
[00:54:49]  And I remember upon my first reading, I assumed it was going to be.
[00:54:54]  So this guy's published by the same people who did Chicken Soup for the Soul, right?
[00:54:56]  Yeah.
[00:54:57]  Which was huge.
[00:54:58]  Definitely read those.
[00:54:59]  Huge in the 90s.
[00:55:00]  Actually, that was a signed reading of myself.
[00:55:02]  Oh, Jesus.
[00:55:03]  I'm sorry.
[00:55:03]  We had this one.
[00:55:04]  I've talked about it before, but we had this one very weird religious class by a woman who was an alcoholic.
[00:55:11]  And she would just roll in the TV in the old school style.
[00:55:13]  You know, they roll it in.
[00:55:15]  It's got the big thick TV on.
[00:55:16]  Strap down.
[00:55:17]  Yeah.
[00:55:18]  And put on Oprah.
[00:55:21]  But I think, and literally, and I think she was drinking during this, but she assigned definitely stories of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
[00:55:28]  So I'm very familiar with their work.
[00:55:31]  I mean, it was unavoidable in the late 90s.
[00:55:34]  Yeah, it was several chicken soup versions.
[00:55:37]  It wasn't.
[00:55:38]  Oh, God.
[00:55:38]  There was chicken soup for the teen soul.
[00:55:40]  There was chicken soup for the college student soul.
[00:55:42]  I think there might have been a chicken soup for like the pre-college, pre-collegiate soul.
[00:55:46]  There was ones for moms.
[00:55:47]  There was chicken soup for the Korean.
[00:55:49]  They got fairly granular, I think.
[00:55:51]  Oh, it just, it just kept going.
[00:55:53]  Yeah.
[00:55:55]  And it was, I mean, my association with them was what I'd see it.
[00:55:59]  I would predominantly see it in people's houses who didn't have many other books.
[00:56:03]  As of 2023, there have been 321 chicken soup for the soul publications.
[00:56:10]  What's the last one?
[00:56:12]  Oh, let's see how weird it's going to end.
[00:56:15]  This is the Wikipedia for Chicken Soup for the Soul is longer than World War II.
[00:56:20]  Come on, furry soul.
[00:56:21]  Chicken Soup for the Soul.
[00:56:22]  Apple.
[00:56:23]  Covering for Traumatic Brain Injuries.
[00:56:25]  Chicken Soup for the Shopper's Soul.
[00:56:27]  Chicken Soup for the Single Soul.
[00:56:30]  Chicken Soup for the Soul, the story behind the song.
[00:56:33]  Chicken Soup for the Tea Lover's Soul.
[00:56:36]  Chicken Soup Touched by an Angel.
[00:56:39]  Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul.
[00:56:41]  Like the Flintstones and the Jetsons.
[00:56:43]  Second Chicken Soup.
[00:56:44]  Oh, Sopa de pollo para al alma de los Padres.
[00:56:49]  What do we have?
[00:56:50]  Chicken soup for the network marketer's soul.
[00:56:52]  Chicken soup for the NASCAR soul.
[00:56:54]  Chicken scoop for the mother of preschoolers' soul.
[00:56:58]  There are a lot of souls that chicken soup is being made for.
[00:57:02]  But they, yeah, it's the same company that published a child called It, right?
[00:57:06]  Yeah.
[00:57:07]  And in the beginning of the child called It, in his, let me tell you this.
[00:57:11]  I don't know what it's called.
[00:57:12]  You're a writer.
[00:57:14]  You should know.
[00:57:15]  You know how the words are on a page, right?
[00:57:18]  Yeah, typesetting, kerning, whatever, bro.
[00:57:22]  The words are on the page.
[00:57:23]  Right, right.
[00:57:24]  The distance between the words and the top of the page.
[00:57:28]  The margins?
[00:57:29]  The margins.
[00:57:30]  The margins on a child called it go crazy.
[00:57:34]  It's like two inches down.
[00:57:36]  That's when you're a kid and you're like, yeah, I can write five pages.
[00:57:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:57:42]  Also, it's like, you guys ever see big, big letter edition books for old people?
[00:57:46]  Yes, right.
[00:57:47]  I guess it's all replaced by Sudoku now.
[00:57:49]  They do that for a phone now.
[00:57:50]  I met a guy recently.
[00:57:51]  This is 100% for old people.
[00:57:53]  I met a guy recently who had big shit on his phone, young gentleman.
[00:57:58]  I can't remember where I met him.
[00:57:59]  But he was like, this is like a thing you're supposed to do to not strain your eyes.
[00:58:02]  And I was like, that's interesting.
[00:58:03]  Just disregard.
[00:58:04]  I'll never do that.
[00:58:05]  But I guess people who don't have eye things do it.
[00:58:08]  Anyways.
[00:58:09]  Classic Received Wisdom.
[00:58:10]  So this book is still, the author of this book still maintains that it is his true memoir.
[00:58:16]  Right.
[00:58:17]  As Bill Jan calls it.
[00:58:18]  Well, what was surprising was the chicken soup for the soul books all have a very kind of glad-handed, sentimental sort of tone.
[00:58:27]  There's a range of stories in them.
[00:58:29]  They're effectively an anthology.
[00:58:30]  Yeah, you feel good.
[00:58:31]  But they're inspirational.
[00:58:33]  Yeah.
[00:58:33]  And it's inspirational.
[00:58:34]  It says so on the fucking back.
[00:58:36]  It may say self-help/slash inspiration or whatever.
[00:58:39]  And this is packaged exactly the same way.
[00:58:42]  I believe.
[00:58:43]  I believe it's a category tag for shelving at bookstores is, yeah, self-help, inspiration.
[00:58:50]  Angel on the cover, right?
[00:58:51]  Big print for women.
[00:58:53]  Sorry.
[00:58:54]  Big print for old folks.
[00:58:56]  Old ladies.
[00:58:59]  And old men.
[00:59:00]  And old men.
[00:59:01]  Old men don't read, though.
[00:59:02]  That's the thing.
[00:59:03]  They just watch World War II.
[00:59:04]  Maybe the racing papers.
[00:59:06]  That's, you know, I'm going to.
[00:59:09]  But then when you read it, it's like Brett Eastonellis.
[00:59:14]  It's graphic, graphic descriptions of like torture or of a, you know, it's never really clear what age he is.
[00:59:23]  The timeline is almost impossible to fucking follow.
[00:59:25]  You're like, is he four or is he 11?
[00:59:28]  Like grades get mentioned, but then, you know, he kind of, his mom tricks the principal into holding him back from some grades.
[00:59:37]  It's just like this like kind of phantasmagorical, like just nightmare.
[00:59:42]  Like imagine all the most like awful things you could ever do to a child and all of that happened to it.
[00:59:47]  All of it happened to him.
[00:59:48]  And there's no way to tell, did this, you know, like one bad thing happen every year?
[00:59:52]  Was this all over the course of like six months?
[00:59:55]  Six month period.
[00:59:57]  He kind of goes back and forth.
[00:59:59]  In it, it starts when he's in first grade and continues until he's taken away from his family at 12 in fifth grade.
[01:00:06]  In later books, he claims that it started when he was four before preschool.
[01:00:12]  And it's just, and you just don't get a sense of it from the book.
[01:00:15]  The book is written like fairly effectively, I got to say, from kind of from like a child's perspective.
[01:00:22]  Yeah, it does.
[01:00:23]  It does sort of like, it does, you almost suspend belief of like thinking that like, oh no, like a fully grown adult Air Force veteran wrote this.
[01:00:31]  Right.
[01:00:31]  It's actually, because it's written in a very childlike way.
[01:00:34]  Right?
[01:00:35]  Did you read a little bit of it?
[01:00:36]  I would love to read a specific passage which has stayed with me since I first read it.
[01:00:41]  Now, Liz, don't worry because this is not true.
[01:00:48]  Yeah, that's what worries me.
[01:00:50]  I knew Mother had something hideous on her mind.
[01:00:53]  As soon as they left, she brought out one of Russell's soiled diapers.
[01:00:56]  She smeared the diaper on my face.
[01:00:58]  I tried to sit perfectly still.
[01:01:00]  I knew if I moved, it would only be worse.
[01:01:02]  I didn't look up.
[01:01:03]  I couldn't see Mother standing over me, but I could hear her heavy breathing.
[01:01:07]  After what seemed like an hour, Mother knelt down beside me and in a soft voice said, Eat it.
[01:01:13]  So there's multiple instances where he has to eat poo-poo in this book.
[01:01:17]  And no, just that one in the first one.
[01:01:19]  He dog poo.
[01:01:21]  Later, he, after publishing it and writing his teenage memoirs and then his adult memoirs in the teenage memoirs, he tells one of his foster parents that he was forced to eat dog shit.
[01:01:33]  Yes, and I forgot, yeah, you're correct because there is a third addition to that, or another addition to that, where in a later interview, he clarifies that it had worms in it.
[01:01:41]  And you can sort of see the logic that he's working with here because what Pelzer's, Pelzer in his life, you know, he goes through this like, you know, he writes these books when he's a fully grown adult.
[01:01:53]  Like he's married, he's been in the Air Force, like he has a job, and he starts writing this memoir.
[01:01:59]  And in fact, he makes it seem that, or it, or it kind of just seems like his first wife left him because she's like, what the fuck are you writing?
[01:02:10]  Like, this is like, what are you talking about?
[01:02:12]  Well, he was also working on this weird erotic fiction.
[01:02:15]  Yeah, or just like, did this, like, I don't think this happened to you.
[01:02:17]  Like, why did you write this?
[01:02:19]  He was part of a program coming out of the Air Force.
[01:02:21]  He was in the Air Force for a while.
[01:02:22]  Yeah.
[01:02:23]  Like, up until the Gulf War.
[01:02:24]  And then he comes, like, the Air Force helps him get into a program where he promotes foster care, like awareness.
[01:02:30]  And he goes to like, it seems like he gives speeches to like the Rotarians and the JCs and stuff like that.
[01:02:35]  He gets a couple awards, which he always puts in his bio.
[01:02:37]  Always.
[01:02:38]  Like, you know, top young American, these kind of things for his work with foster children.
[01:02:44]  And this kind of comes right at the tail of that, at the tail end of that work, written in 1995.
[01:02:51]  And yeah, he ends up leaving, you know, he and his first wife don't stay together.
[01:02:57]  However, that kind of went down.
[01:02:59]  And he ends up marrying his editor from the publishing house that did the chicken soup books and did his Health Communications Incorporated, based out of Florida.
[01:03:08]  See, if you marry your editor, they can't testify against it.
[01:03:11]  Yeah, they can't testify against it.
[01:03:12]  It's true.
[01:03:14]  And then when he gets to writing about his later life, he just savages his fucking first wife.
[01:03:23]  He hates her?
[01:03:24]  Doesn't even do the thing where, you know, he started like, oh, it started off real romantic.
[01:03:29]  It was like, oh, we were in love with each other.
[01:03:32]  Then cracks began to show.
[01:03:35]  He starts her off as basically like, what do you call it, a base bunny?
[01:03:38]  Like someone who's trying to like, like trying to get benefits, hook up with a pilot, get pregnant, so then get married and get like, you know, military wife benefits.
[01:03:46]  Yeah.
[01:03:47]  And like just a lousy one at that.
[01:03:49]  And she's a drunk and he has no idea what to, like, what to do with her.
[01:03:54]  She's constantly just disappearing.
[01:03:56]  All his friends.
[01:03:57]  None of his friends show up to his wedding because they're like, they think this is a bad idea.
[01:04:01]  But it's.
[01:04:03]  And this, and this is weird because you.
[01:04:04]  That's a classic lie.
[01:04:05]  I'm sorry.
[01:04:05]  That's a classic lie.
[01:04:07]  No one is not going to someone's wedding because they think they shouldn't get married.
[01:04:10]  You're not like, I'm protesting.
[01:04:11]  I'm going to the wedding.
[01:04:12]  You go to the wedding and you're like, to your seatmate.
[01:04:17]  You're like, man, I don't really want to do that.
[01:04:20]  And then you take bets on when you're going to get divorced.
[01:04:23]  And then you go get drunk at the party.
[01:04:25]  And you try to catch the bouquet.
[01:04:26]  Yeah.
[01:04:27]  And then you don't say anything until later when your homie comes to you and is like, oh my God, I should have never got married.
[01:04:32]  And then you're like, homie, I love you.
[01:04:34]  I didn't say anything at the time because I'm your friend and I support you, but I agree you shouldn't have never gotten married.
[01:04:40]  Right.
[01:04:40]  That's how that goes down.
[01:04:41]  So classic lie.
[01:04:42]  But it also fits in Pelzer's scheme of his life, which is just like bad things can't stop happening to this dude.
[01:04:49]  Even once he's gotten out of, you know, first he's at home, he's mother's prisoner and he's having shit smeared on his face and thrown downstairs and choked unconscious.
[01:04:57]  Stabbed.
[01:04:58]  Stabbed.
[01:04:59]  His mother stabs him.
[01:05:00]  Later, the stabbing becomes her throwing a knife into him.
[01:05:04]  Oh, whoa, like a shrink.
[01:05:06]  But I think that's how his brother remembered it.
[01:05:08]  Throwing a shrink into him.
[01:05:10]  Yeah.
[01:05:12]  And then he's in foster care and everybody hates him because he's a foster child.
[01:05:16]  But he's also discrediting potential witnesses to his lies.
[01:05:20]  Always, yeah.
[01:05:21]  Well, that's the funny thing, right?
[01:05:23]  Because Pelzer is in a house with two and then later three brothers because one is four.
[01:05:28]  Four.
[01:05:28]  Yeah.
[01:05:28]  He's the fifth, or he's the second of five.
[01:05:30]  Yeah.
[01:05:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:05:32]  And New York Times eventually, he refuses to give his brothers, you know, he changed the names or whatever, but he's, which he says is to protect his brothers, but he refuses to like hook interviewers up with them.
[01:05:45]  And then this, this New York Times thing's come out.
[01:05:46]  Is that 2003 or 1990?
[01:05:48]  I think it's 2003.
[01:05:49]  The New York Times article coming out.
[01:05:51]  Two, yeah.
[01:05:51]  Two, yeah.
[01:05:52]  Early 2000.
[01:05:53]  It's after the third book comes out, and they actually get in touch with his brother, one of his brothers.
[01:05:59]  Trying to basically verify these stories.
[01:06:01]  Yes.
[01:06:01]  And they're like, did this happen?
[01:06:02]  His brother's like, no.
[01:06:04]  His brother and his grandmother.
[01:06:05]  Yeah, they're like, nothing like this happened.
[01:06:07]  We were the little three musketeers.
[01:06:08]  Like, you know, we had like...
[01:06:09]  Were they aware of the publication of all this?
[01:06:12]  I mean, they must have been.
[01:06:13]  Yeah.
[01:06:14]  I mean, one of the brothers, one of the brothers purportedly stands by the account and says that once Pelzer was taken out and put in foster care, that he was then the target of his mom's abuse, that she just shifted gears towards him.
[01:06:28]  Although when he writes about talking to his brother later on in his life, he was like, yeah, we wouldn't let her do the physical shit though.
[01:06:35]  But like, she was still, she was very controlling and she would always say mean things.
[01:06:38]  And there's, I mean, one of the things with mother, the character of mother, is she talks like the fucking wicked witch.
[01:06:48]  Like, there's no, there's no sense of realism.
[01:06:50]  And it's like, you know, when he's either five or 11, which is a wide breadth of age.
[01:06:58]  Yeah, very different subjectivity, virus.
[01:07:01]  Very long time to be taking what are effectively life-ending blows from a woman, seemingly on, you know, a super frequent basis.
[01:07:12]  But it's, you know, you put a mom being angry at you in that context.
[01:07:18]  Then of course it would be like, like, you know what you are.
[01:07:21]  Like, you know, like you and you're driving your father away from me because you're just it.
[01:07:25]  You're just that thing and you're mine to control and stuff like that.
[01:07:30]  However, he encounters her in later life and she still speaks like that.
[01:07:34]  And she speaks like that without any sort of, like she just starts, like that's, that's the only way she talks.
[01:07:40]  She doesn't ramp up to something.
[01:07:41]  There's not, she's just one note.
[01:07:44]  She's evil for no fucking reason whatsoever.
[01:07:47]  And this is sort of how he, you know, he talks about in the beginning of the book, he talks about how great his mom was right up until a point around, you know, in the book, it's first book, it's in first grade.
[01:07:58]  And then she switched and then she became a drunk and she started hitting him and she ramped up the abuse and then eventually had to be taken out of the house, right?
[01:08:05]  And put into foster care.
[01:08:06]  One brother says, yeah, that's basically what happened.
[01:08:09]  And then it happened to me after he was gone.
[01:08:10]  The other brother says, no, Dave was a bad fucking kid.
[01:08:13]  He constantly got in fucking trouble and he got sent to foster care after getting sent to juvenile hall because he like set part of the school on fire.
[01:08:22]  Oh, and by the way, he was stealing everything.
[01:08:25]  Now, by the way, both of those accounts don't, both of those things could have happened.
[01:08:30]  They could.
[01:08:30]  He could still be a bad kid and also have suffered.
[01:08:33]  And Dave, Dave constantly, you know, in A Child Called It, he makes really passing reference to, he's like, look, I was like most kids.
[01:08:40]  I'd got in trouble for causing mischief.
[01:08:43]  And, you know, I sometimes lied.
[01:08:50]  But then for no reason whatsoever, my mother started stabbing me.

=== Abuse Memoir Exaggerations (08:55) ===

[01:08:53]  It's so interesting.
[01:08:54]  Trying to cook me over the stove.
[01:08:55]  He insists on the no reason whatsoever because obviously something, just to take him out of his word, right?
[01:09:02]  Setting aside the truth of the, you know, whatever, truth of the matter, like it's interesting that the, like there's no, he can't, it's almost like he like physically can't bring himself to try to investigate the location or like why things changed with his mother.
[01:09:21]  The idea that someone would just decide like, today I woke up and now I abused my child is like so absurd.
[01:09:26]  And like, that's just not how any of that.
[01:09:28]  And only one child.
[01:09:30]  Well, yeah, but I just mean like, like clearly, even just like to take a, take it as a text, whatever, like, something did happen, but he is not interested or incapable of seeing this person as someone who could have adjusted, like, could have something that had happened to her life that forced her to do this.
[01:09:49]  Right.
[01:09:49]  Well, and it's upon, you know, the first time I realized that the most unbelievable part of it was sort of, oh, well.
[01:09:56]  Not that that happened.
[01:09:57]  I'm just saying.
[01:09:57]  Right.
[01:09:57]  Yeah, no.
[01:09:58]  Well, and he likes to bring up, it's like, you know, there's an idea called the targeted child where in families with multiple kids that the abuser will just seize on one and sometimes the others will be treated like normal or like, you know, showered with affection while the one kid.
[01:10:15]  And this is real.
[01:10:16]  You know, this is a pattern that's been seen in, you know, in child abuse and that would fit his circumstance.
[01:10:23]  The problem I always had on first reading it is like one of the most unbelievable parts is him, that it's not like he's a kind of bad kid and his mother just goes way out of control and has problems and is a drunk.
[01:10:37]  He's a perfect kid.
[01:10:38]  He's a perfect little angel that doesn't do anything wrong.
[01:10:42]  He's getting the best grades in his school, which makes him getting held back in first grade even more mysterious and barbaric of his mother to do.
[01:10:52]  And at no point does he kind of like depict himself as internal monologue or anything.
[01:10:59]  He's like little baby Jesus Christ.
[01:11:02]  Like he just suffers all this abuse.
[01:11:05]  And it comes out of, and it's completely dislocated from any sort of context.
[01:11:09]  It comes out of nowhere.
[01:11:10]  He didn't do something to make his mom angry.
[01:11:13]  She was just waiting for her opportunity to hurt him constantly.
[01:11:17]  And one of the problems that people who advocate for abuse victims, stuff like this had with the book when it came out, and one of the things that raised red flags in the 90s and led to the New York Times article and stuff like that was like, they were like, there's weird things missing from this.
[01:11:34]  And one of them is a sense of chronology.
[01:11:37]  It's the context for like there's details that are common to abuse memoirs that aren't present here.
[01:11:48]  And it's almost as if he's in in, you know, in writing this thing, he's shaved away the moments between the incidents of abuse and just like, you know, it's like he turned the camera on at the worst, like right when it had ramped up to the worst possible moment.
[01:12:03]  But it, you know, it makes it like I was, I couldn't have been more than 30 pages through before I was like, I was like, this is just, this just reads suspiciously, right?
[01:12:15]  This reads like that indefinable quality where you're like, someone's lying to me.
[01:12:20]  Yeah.
[01:12:21]  You know, and lying about this.
[01:12:22]  And I always thought it was like, which doesn't mean that nothing in, you know, nothing in the book happened or that everything in the book didn't happen.
[01:12:30]  There's just, there's some sort of missing context there.
[01:12:34]  I have like a theory.
[01:12:35]  Yeah, that's very interesting.
[01:12:36]  I mean, it does, when I was skimming through it, I mean, it has this quality of, it reminds me of a like magician who is like interested in like creating something like, you know, it's a sleight of hand.
[01:12:49]  Like, yo, look at how insane this one thing is.
[01:12:51]  So you don't look at this other thing, right?
[01:12:53]  You don't notice that this is what's actually happening over here with my left hand.
[01:12:58]  You need to look at the big show to kind of distract you.
[01:13:00]  It feels like the art of distraction a little bit with the insane exaggerations.
[01:13:05]  But it does sort of beg the question of like, oh, all of those missing things.
[01:13:08]  Like, when is it, I mean, it could be that someone was just sitting down to write something very titillating, something that they found titillating, which begs its own sort of question, psychological or analytical questions, right?
[01:13:22]  But also that like, I don't know, maybe his inability to see this character of mother as anything other than a kind of avatar of abuse, because that's really what it is.
[01:13:35]  I mean, it's like almost a costume.
[01:13:36]  Yeah.
[01:13:37]  Like saying that like, just she woke up one day and then she was an abusive person.
[01:13:41]  I was perfect before.
[01:13:42]  And then I was abused.
[01:13:43]  Like all of this stuff is just very, like you're saying, it makes no sense chronologically, contextually, all this stuff.
[01:13:49]  But it does feel like classic, like the inability to see someone else as a person with motivation, like as a fully formed human feels stunted in a way.
[01:14:01]  Right.
[01:14:01]  And which would make total sense with the abuse and with the relationship with the abuser.
[01:14:05]  The problem is he then goes on to write about his teenage years in foster care.
[01:14:08]  And then he writes about, you know, getting into the Air Force and then moving on with his life from there and running back into his mother and stuff like that.
[01:14:14]  And literally everybody he meets is like either an indescribable asshole to him or like a couple of them take a chance on him and are nice.
[01:14:24]  And he, he always has the last word.
[01:14:27]  He's always calm and he's always getting yelled at by people who aren't his mom, who for thin reasons.
[01:14:36]  And he's always calm and in charge and has the perfect like response back to them.
[01:14:42]  And it's, it reminds me of that, you know, if everybody you meet is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.
[01:14:48]  Right.
[01:14:49]  And it's, and, and as said before, in A Child Called It, he's a perfect, he's a perfect kid.
[01:14:57]  He's, you know, perfectly undeserving of this abuse, which, you know, obviously no one deserves abuse and stuff like that.
[01:15:04]  But he is even when being, you know, and we should probably mention just how crazy the abuse is.
[01:15:10]  Like he's getting he's getting hit.
[01:15:12]  We're not talking about like he's getting hit a lot, but he's also being starved for weeks on end.
[01:15:17]  Yeah, so here's the thing.
[01:15:19]  It's not like the abuse that you might be thinking of where a child's getting hit and like, you know, sort of the common place abuses.
[01:15:25]  He's too.
[01:15:26]  He's like, his parents, his mom is like, lay on the stove while I turn it on.
[01:15:31]  And like, because she read an article about another mother doing that, which I always thought was like, that's like a paranormal.
[01:15:37]  A mom being like, you know what?
[01:15:39]  But also, wait, did anyone find that article about this?
[01:15:41]  His mom would somehow know if he ate it at school and then punch him in the stomach and make him throw up and eat the throw-up.
[01:15:46]  And like, it's like, it reminds me, it's a lot of that, like, well, I mean, it's just like your bullshit detector goes off.
[01:15:52]  You know, it's like, you know, he had to, she would, he would only eat out of the trash, but then she started putting ammonia on all the trash so that he couldn't eat it.
[01:16:00]  And so it was.
[01:16:01]  Well, she left, she supposedly cooked a pork chop, left it in the refrigerator long enough for it to spoil, then put it in the trash can just to trick him into eating it from the trash can to give him diarrhea.
[01:16:15]  Yeah.
[01:16:16]  First of all, two things that mothers love: one, giving their child diarrhea, and two, having spoiled food.
[01:16:22]  Spending money to spoil food on purpose.
[01:16:26]  Right?
[01:16:26]  And having spoiled food in your refrigerator, which, you know.
[01:16:29]  And to spend time cooking something that isn't, yeah, I mean, which then spoils other food around it.
[01:16:33]  It's so much there, right?
[01:16:36]  It's weird.
[01:16:36]  It's like it's not even like a grown man lying about something that may or may not have happened to some degree in his childhood.
[01:16:45]  It's like the way a child lies about things.
[01:16:48]  Yeah.
[01:16:48]  It's just this weird, like super fantastical, like view of the adult world of this thing that's like way bigger and everybody, you know, everybody's ganged up against him.
[01:17:00]  And the problem is it continues throughout his life.
[01:17:03]  Everybody is always ganging up against him.
[01:17:05]  Like once he's in foster care, which, you know, which he likes, once he's in the Air Force, once he has to come to the hospital to see his father die, like once he's trying to get married and everybody thinks it's a bad idea, including seemingly him, since his only description of his first wife is just her being a mess and him being worried about her and not wanting to get married and feeling sick about the whole thing.
[01:17:31]  It's just this, it's like the pity party continues, which then casts whatever doubts you had like reading through the first one, which may be allayed by being like, fuck man, when I'm getting punched in the face by my mom at age six or 11, my memory is probably not going to be great at that.

=== Keeping It Hyperbolic (11:29) ===

[01:17:48]  And it's probably going to be very scary and stuff like that.
[01:17:50]  But you're like, he repeats, he keeps repeating these tropes throughout his life.
[01:18:00]  And you're like, well, if none of the, you know, if none of the rest of this is believable.
[01:18:04]  Yeah.
[01:18:05]  Like.
[01:18:06]  Well, it's interesting because, you know, you have to keep this in the context too of like Pelzer's career, right?
[01:18:12]  Like, it's not like he just wrote these books and these books came out.
[01:18:15]  Like, it's a different situation a little bit than like a million little pieces, which we should talk about.
[01:18:22]  Yeah.
[01:18:22]  Because like the Million Little Pieces is, you know, James Frey's sort of famous memoir that came out about his, which during a big glut of drug memoirs that came out that detailed his like crazy, fucked up, you know, horrible life, smoking crack and, you know, whatever, like doing, a girl's doing lines off of his dick, which I'm like, come on, bro.
[01:18:46]  Hit up.
[01:18:47]  Off your dick.
[01:18:48]  I'm never, I guess I put co-weird.
[01:18:51]  Yeah, actually, that's not that unbelievable.
[01:18:52]  But he like puts it as a low point.
[01:18:54]  I'm like, come on.
[01:18:56]  But it's mine.
[01:18:59]  You could maybe do a bump off of mine.
[01:19:01]  But he like, it's different than that because James Frey was like trying to be like a cool memoirist.
[01:19:08]  He wasn't trying to be like necessarily an inspirational figure in some way.
[01:19:12]  I mean, Oprah kind of made it.
[01:19:13]  He was trying to be better Jerry Stahl.
[01:19:15]  He was trying to be more intense, more badass Jerry Stahl for the badass 2000s.
[01:19:20]  But what David Peltzer tries to do is, or not tries to do, very successfully does, is he understands very much that what he's selling is a product and he treats it like a traveling salesman.
[01:19:32]  So everybody I'm sure listening knows that like bestsellers are fake.
[01:19:36]  That like most bestsellers are just people like the publishing company or sometimes the author buying bulk copies of a book.
[01:19:44]  The charts are a lie.
[01:19:46]  The charts are a lie.
[01:19:47]  It's all rigged.
[01:19:47]  The numbers are juiced.
[01:19:49]  And so what Pelzer would do is he would buy a ton of copies, thus keeping it on the New York Times bestseller list, his child called It.
[01:19:57]  And he would essentially go and hawk it in kind of like live shows.
[01:20:02]  But what it would really do is he would talk to like an auditorium full of teenagers or an auditorium very often full of like marketing people or an office that was having like a, I don't know, not a spirit day.
[01:20:15]  What do they call when they make offices do stuff like that?
[01:20:18]  You know, like compulsory fun.
[01:20:20]  Yeah.
[01:20:20]  Well, no, not even fun, like, but you know, they would make a team building.
[01:20:24]  Yeah, they'd have him like come and speak at team building things and he would sell the book.
[01:20:27]  And he's very, very like clear about that.
[01:20:29]  Like that is what his mission is.
[01:20:31]  And so like there, there's like an added sense of unease with some of this stuff is that's like, oh, like this is just like, he wasn't, he didn't become like a big like advocate for like, you know, children or anything like that.
[01:20:42]  It was really like he was, it was selling, it was selling this memoir very specifically.
[01:20:48]  Well, he starts as an advocate for like foster care reform and supporting foster care.
[01:20:53]  And the context of this too is that it's the middle of the Clinton years and welfare is being like having its last part stripped away.
[01:20:58]  Yeah.
[01:20:59]  Right.
[01:21:00]  And that a lot of these state institutions are running into the government equivalent of bankruptcy.
[01:21:07]  Right.
[01:21:08]  And so he's sticking up for these kids, but then he sort of like gradually transitions into this motivational speaker whose focus is not on not on foster care and child abuse and recognizing signs of child abuse.
[01:21:27]  It's perseverance and resilience, which starts as being like, hey, look how bad my life was.
[01:21:32]  You can get through this stuff, which has an application to sufferers of trauma, child abuse victims and things like that, but eventually turns into this weird kind of attitude where he's like, my life was worse than yours.
[01:21:45]  Like, get over it.
[01:21:46]  Like, don't, which, you know, it's kind of like a tough love sort of sell.
[01:21:51]  Very much.
[01:21:51]  It's a really weird one for somebody who, you know, who starts down this road by being like a champion, a champion of the institutions and of the community being involved and has testimonials in the back of his book that start from the people who helped rescue him, but then just eventually become testimonials from people he knew in his neighborhood.
[01:22:14]  And then by the third book, just become testimonials from his wife and son about how good he is.
[01:22:19]  It's kind of weird that his books have testimonials in the back, too.
[01:22:23]  An odd tick, but I feel like kind of in keeping with his publishing house.
[01:22:29]  It's in keeping with the format of Chicken Soup for the Soul.
[01:22:45]  Well, it's – I mean I kind of want to bring it a little to a million little pieces too because I think there's some similarities in kind of the reactions to the book, right?
[01:22:55]  Because like, you know, to sort of, I guess, the more discerning reader, you know, you read these things and you're like, I mean, I don't know if we've done justice enough just enough to like how sort of unbelievable this book is when you read it.
[01:23:07]  It's like just, it's, it's, it's really like, I mean, he's.
[01:23:11]  It's like hyperbolic.
[01:23:11]  It's absurd.
[01:23:12]  It's beyond hype.
[01:23:13]  Yeah, completely hyperbolic.
[01:23:15]  It is just like unrelenting, like 150 pages, but spaced weird.
[01:23:19]  So maybe it's like 200 pages.
[01:23:21]  It reads like something that you would find on like a GeoCities website that was like self-published with like an old web counter of someone like prior to like, what's the Twilight fanfic movie called? 50 Shades of Gray getting like kind of blowing up that spot of like people thinking they can write or whatever.
[01:23:40]  That's where it feels like you would find this.
[01:23:42]  The language always reminded me of like what we called like hate zines in the 90s.
[01:23:46]  Like Jim and Debbie Goads Answer Me, Peter Sotis is Pure and things like that, which would often, I was going to say drift into subjects like child abuse and pedophilia and stuff like that.
[01:23:57]  But to drift somewhere, you have to start somewhere else.
[01:24:00]  We're about those things and we're about those things very graphically.
[01:24:04]  And I think I already mentioned Brett Easton Ellis, but it's like A Child Called It comes out between American Psycho and Glamorama.
[01:24:11]  And it's like many of the passages, if it didn't have an angel on the cover, this could have been sold as like transgressive literature of the period.
[01:24:19]  Right?
[01:24:20]  It wouldn't have had a bigger, like it wouldn't have had the same audience.
[01:24:23]  Something that I was sort of, I guess I shouldn't have been, but I was kind of surprised to find is that when I was reading about it online, many of the people were like, I know people say that like it's made up or whatever, but like, I don't care.
[01:24:34]  It's still an inspirational story.
[01:24:36]  So then I was reading about some of these other books, specifically about A Million Little Pieces, which I was really surprised by because A Million Little Pieces was like sort of famously fake, right?
[01:24:46]  Famously debooked.
[01:24:47]  Debooked because Oprah, for those who don't remember, you know, Million Little Pieces is a drug memoir.
[01:24:52]  Oprah had had the first, it was like the first drug novel on her list, too.
[01:24:59]  And any author that got their book on Oprah's book list, it immediately shot, it was sold out, reprinted for eternity.
[01:25:08]  The golden stamp was your ticket.
[01:25:10]  Golden stamp.
[01:25:11]  Yeah.
[01:25:11]  Now someone else has taken over from this.
[01:25:13]  I think it's Rhys Witherspoon.
[01:25:14]  Are they still selling books like this?
[01:25:16]  Reese Witherspoon is.
[01:25:18]  God bless her.
[01:25:20]  But yeah, so A Million Little Pieces was a huge fucking hit.
[01:25:25]  A huge hit.
[01:25:26]  Huge hit.
[01:25:27]  And it's.
[01:25:27]  And Oprah kind of put her credibility on the line there too with it, which is sort of tied up in this.
[01:25:32]  I read part of it and I had no idea that it was written in that kind of like beat style where he like capitalizes random words and like, well, like, he doesn't use commas.
[01:25:42]  And it's like, I thought it was like, I remember when I was like a teenager, we read, or I read, I think it was a beautiful, maybe I had read this in rehab, actually.
[01:25:51]  But like when I was kind of younger, I read A Beautiful Boy, which was like a guy's memoir of his son's drug use in San Francisco.
[01:25:59]  And it was just like a fairly straight memoir, you know what I mean, kind of thing.
[01:26:02]  Like it wasn't written in any like special way.
[01:26:04]  And I assume this was a similar kind of thing.
[01:26:06]  But no, it's written like – This one had like street eggs.
[01:26:08]  I'm bad and I'm fucking.
[01:26:10]  And then I was reading more about James Frey, who, by the way, is now a very successful owner of an esports company.
[01:26:17]  I was reading about him and he's like, yeah, I want to be like fucking, I'm like, you know, he's like talking about, he's like kind of like, you know, he poses for a New York Observer article with a bunch of his books.
[01:26:27]  And he can, you know, Death in the Installment Plan is like prominently featured in the books that he put there.
[01:26:31]  I'm like, all right.
[01:26:32]  Well, that's, listen, it's a fine book, but I don't know if it's, I would want that to be next to me on the Observer.
[01:26:39]  But what's up?
[01:26:42]  I said that's a great book.
[01:26:44]  It's all right.
[01:26:45]  It's a classic, but I don't know.
[01:26:47]  I like some of this.
[01:26:48]  You've been reading about this.
[01:26:49]  What's the gap between his first Oprah appearance and the big like apology Oprah appearance?
[01:26:54]  It's about eight years.
[01:26:55]  So yeah, the gap, I think it's about eight years.
[01:26:57]  So he goes on Oprah, and this is after a like nine-page and page internet page, but very long smoking gun.
[01:27:06]  I don't know if you guys remember that website.
[01:27:08]  The smoking gun investigation into his claims comes out.
[01:27:12]  And they're like, oh, this is false.
[01:27:13]  Like this guy, you know, he talked about being, you know, in jail for a long time, wrong, never happened.
[01:27:20]  Like, which was a huge, critical part of the story.
[01:27:23]  He talks about all these different arrests.
[01:27:24]  He talks about all these people.
[01:27:25]  He talks about all this drug use, blah, blah.
[01:27:27]  Like, it turns out that he's kind of just repeating old junkies tales about, you know, like, you know, I had friends in A who around the time of like the second Oprah appearance when people were starting to like question it.
[01:27:40]  Yeah.
[01:27:40]  Because it was popular with a lot of like, in a lot of like recovery programs.
[01:27:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:27:45]  Stuff like that.
[01:27:45]  But the common, the common thread when people would read it would be like, wait, these are just, these are fucking urban legends.
[01:27:50]  Yeah.
[01:27:51]  They're stuff I've been hearing ever since I've been in AA, you know?
[01:27:54]  Yeah.
[01:27:54]  And it's like this guy claims they all happened to him.
[01:27:57]  And by 23, too.
[01:27:59]  And it's, it's, and, and he wrote a sequel called My Friend Leonard, which is even crazier because it's about him being the protege of a mafia Don and a black federal judge who conspire together, who like to like help him out and like give him kind of like fatherly, like badass advice.
[01:28:17]  It's so corny.
[01:28:19]  And it, of course, these are sold as memoirs.
[01:28:21]  These are sold as things that happened to him.
[01:28:23]  And then Oprah brings him on the show after the smoking gun comes out, the smoking gun investigation comes out and it's like confronts him basically.
[01:28:31]  And it's a huge TV moment, massive TV moment.
[01:28:36]  She later apologizes for it because it was kind of an ambush interview in her last season.
[01:28:42]  I know.
[01:28:42]  It's interesting.
[01:28:44]  I know.
[01:28:44]  But it became like his publisher.
[01:28:47]  I was sort of surprised by it.
[01:28:48]  His publisher stood by him.
[01:28:52]  And while they did, I think maybe eventually change it to fiction, he actually retained a book contract.
[01:28:57]  He wrote a successful novel, which apparently is also the reviews of his books in the New York Times, by the way, are really fucking funny because they hate them all even before it's proven to be fake.
[01:29:09]  But it's funny because I was reading a lot of people's sort of opinions from today about About A Million Little Pieces and about my friend Leonard.

=== Moral Arbiter's Dilemma (15:10) ===

[01:29:18]  And they are people who still acknowledge that they are hoaxes.
[01:29:21]  Not hoaxes necessarily, but they're lies, right?
[01:29:23]  I mean, he is hoaxing his audience.
[01:29:26]  And it really reminds me a lot of some of the stuff that Hassan Minhaj said about his comedy is that like, well, like, you know, it's not like true, but like it gets to the emotional truth of it.
[01:29:40]  You know what I mean?
[01:29:41]  Like it gets to the emotional core of it.
[01:29:43]  And like, even with a child called It, it's like, I think it's, if you, if I think if people, if you read it with even the slightest bit of critical eye, you're like, I don't know if this is true.
[01:29:52]  And I, I assume that many of the people who saw him speak were probably like, I don't know about that.
[01:29:58]  I don't think it was written for people who have a critical eye.
[01:30:01]  Well, it definitely was not.
[01:30:02]  Yeah.
[01:30:03]  In the interviews with Pelster in the late 90s, where he's talking about being on the bestseller list, having this great reach, being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, which there's the Pulitzer Committee doesn't nominate people.
[01:30:17]  Anybody can submit a book to be effectively nominated.
[01:30:20]  Lots of people market themselves based on being nominated for Pulitzer.
[01:30:25]  I could say I've been considered for an Academy Award or something or an Emmy.
[01:30:32]  It doesn't actually mean anything, which that's the charts in the 90s.
[01:30:36]  That's online metrics too.
[01:30:38]  When you get into websites, everything's this fucking game of smoke and mirrors.
[01:30:42]  Nothing is actually, nothing is taught and as factually bound as I think the common person or who hasn't been in the industry things.
[01:30:51]  I mean, one of the things we were talking about was the idea that books have fact checkers, which is largely not true.
[01:30:57]  Like that there's no, you know, there's no institutional apparatus, which is ironic in light of Dave's support for the institutions and stuff like that, to catch things.
[01:31:09]  No.
[01:31:09]  Like, like Frey, it would have been between Frey and his editor, and if they chose to hire somebody who could go call his supposed jailhouse roommate that he spoke to or some of his old junkie friends or whatever, they could do that, but that's not in from what I, you know, from what I've seen of book contracts, it's usually the burden's on the writer.
[01:31:27]  Just be like, hey, like, I assert that all this shit's truthful.
[01:31:30]  Yeah.
[01:31:31]  If we're going to call it nonfiction.
[01:31:32]  But it's like nonfiction is not even a binding category.
[01:31:35]  It's an instruction for bookstore staff of where to keep it to help people.
[01:31:42]  I was going through the book Bunk by Kevin Young, which I think I've referenced before and recommended on the show.
[01:31:50]  And he has a whole chapter on James Frey.
[01:31:52]  It's a book that kind of goes through a sort of history of hoaxes and fakers.
[01:31:55]  And it does a lot of different things.
[01:31:58]  I really recommend it.
[01:31:59]  And yeah, he's fantastic.
[01:32:01]  But he was pointing out that in the new edition of A Million Little Pieces, after this whole scandal broke, the publisher added like a new prefaratory note, which says, this book is a combination of facts about James Frey's life and certain embellishments.
[01:32:21]  Names, dates, places, events, and details have been changed, invented, and altered for literary effect.
[01:32:27]  The reader should not consider this book anything other than a work of literature.
[01:32:32]  And Frey, I mean, Frey, Young, Kevin Young, like really took issue with that and took specific offense to them claiming that what makes literature is fakery, which I think is really interesting and maybe can get us back to the kind of conundrum of Hassan Minhaj, because what he says is, this is Kevin Young.
[01:32:58]  He says, gone is the idea that something made up, real or surreal, could move us.
[01:33:03]  Instead, readers insist that the thing that isn't real is.
[01:33:07]  This is the thing you were talking about with how people were responding to these books.
[01:33:10]  Instead, readers insist that the thing that isn't real is, that if it affects them, it can't be affected.
[01:33:17]  That they cannot have real feelings about made up things.
[01:33:21]  And he goes on, in defending the truth against the hoax, we are in fact defending the imaginary.
[01:33:28]  preserving the possibility that make-believe can make claims on our emotions, but not our facts.
[01:33:33]  That truth is as actual as a tree, yet can be as abstract or verifiable as the DNA that makes it up.
[01:33:41]  Literature comes not from mere falsehoods or simple facts, but from raw, genuine life.
[01:33:47]  And I think that is kind of like, that really gets at it, right?
[01:33:51]  Like, because it's not just that James Frey is like making this up, right?
[01:33:57]  I mean, it's like, yes, that's part of it.
[01:33:59]  But then to go on and claim like, oh, well, it's just literature.
[01:34:05]  It's like, no, the stuff of literature isn't made up from just like, it's just because it's a story.
[01:34:11]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:34:12]  Like, you can't just kind of flip it.
[01:34:15]  And Minhash kind of does the same thing when he relies on this idea of emotional truths, which is sort of the classic, what I would call the classic hoaxer's gambit, which is sort of like, well, it might not be totally true, but it's emotionally true to me.
[01:34:32]  And people will insist on that over and over.
[01:34:35]  And even Kevin Young, who wrote that book a while ago, before obviously any of this stuff came out, consistently, like he cites over and over again people saying like, oh, it's just an emotional truth.
[01:34:47]  It's okay because it's emotionally true.
[01:34:49]  Well, it's like, it feels to me too, like Frey is the first part of a generation of hoaxers who can't just pull the ripcord at the end and be like, you got me.
[01:34:58]  Or alternatively, gotcha.
[01:35:00]  You fell for it.
[01:35:02]  This was the P.T. Barnum exit.
[01:35:04]  Like, haha, you didn't know what the Igorus was.
[01:35:06]  Yeah.
[01:35:06]  Right.
[01:35:07]  And who wants to still have the credibility that they had when they were sitting pretty on this completely nonfiction memoir full of bullshit in their post-life and to be accepted for their apology and continue to be considered like a peer of the literary community.
[01:35:24]  I think it's insulting to say like, hey, treat this as literature because you don't get to say that about yourself.
[01:35:29]  You know, someone else calls you literature.
[01:35:32]  It's like that gets back to the whole idea of being a reporter first and then being a journalist or being a comedian first, then being a truth teller of a comedian or whatever, that write the book.
[01:35:48]  Be a writer first and then worry, let other people, let the world worry about whether you're literature or not.
[01:35:57]  Yeah.
[01:35:58]  Yeah, this is from the New Yorker.
[01:36:00]  Minhaj described his work as the dynamic range that theater and storytelling and comedy allow you to explore.
[01:36:07]  Does that mean audiences should expect his words on stage to stringently hew to the facts on the ground?
[01:36:12]  The slipperiness of memoir finds a new dimension when it's played for laughs in front of a crowd.
[01:36:18]  And then she says, it's not not opinion journalism.
[01:36:21]  And I think that's, you know, maybe we can say that.
[01:36:24]  Comedians might not be comfortable calling themselves anything but comedians, but a number of them, Minhaj included, have inserted themselves pointedly into political conversation.
[01:36:33]  They've become the oddball public intellectuals of our time.
[01:36:37]  And in informing the public, they assume a certain status as moral arbiters.
[01:36:41]  When fibs are told to prove a social point rather than elicit an easy laugh, does their moral weight change?
[01:36:49]  And I just think that's very like that to sort of like, you know, bring us all the way back around.
[01:36:54]  Yeah.
[01:36:55]  All of these stories sort of, you know, obviously they're not comedians.
[01:36:59]  I don't know if we think Hassan Minhaj is a comedian, but.
[01:37:03]  I'll give him that.
[01:37:05]  You know, they are, I think, in their own ways, assuming a different status.
[01:37:13]  Like they're trying to do something else, right?
[01:37:16]  They're not just trying to tell their story.
[01:37:17]  They're not trying to tell their truth.
[01:37:19]  They're trying to, like she says, assume a certain status as a moral arbiter.
[01:37:26]  Right.
[01:37:26]  And in doing so, you assume a different kind of responsibility.
[01:37:30]  You know, what's interesting to me in a discussion of a comedian is that the idea that laughter is kind of downgraded to like this, you know, an easy laugh, a cheap alternative to the gravitas of the moral arbiter.
[01:37:45]  And this is something, like my guess on the Hassan Minaj thing is that if the jokes were funnier, then the veracity of them wouldn't even come into play.
[01:37:56]  That they're, we kind of discount the function of laughter and what is actually happening and, you know, overturning expectation and transmuting what could be horrible things into a feeling of momentary joy, you know, that doesn't even have a descriptor beyond laughing.
[01:38:13]  Like I was trying to think the other day about what the adjective form of laughing is.
[01:38:19]  Like when you're laughing, what are you feeling?
[01:38:22]  Like, I guess amusement, but that's a noun.
[01:38:26]  Laughter should be enough.
[01:38:27]  Like, why is laughter an alternative to, why doesn't laughter have its own fucking moral weight in this topsy-turvy, amoral, you know, godless society we call Canada?
[01:38:40]  Well, I think even like outside of the comedic value, I think that, and this is again while I'll side with the New Yorker on this, is that he that Minhaj is like in his act, and I think this is the same thing that these memoirists, whatever, whatever we want to call them, are also leaning on, is that they are making a claim to authenticity.
[01:39:01]  Like, they're saying, like, I am allowed to make these jokes, or I am saying this, or I am telling you this, because this is authentic.
[01:39:09]  This happened to me.
[01:39:10]  And you're assuming a different status.
[01:39:14]  I think what's interesting is like, you know, there was the Hassan Minaj, I keep saying him like Nikki Minaj.
[01:39:21]  Minhaj, he like clapped back in a very, if you want to see an example of like how his stand-up goes, just watch his like clapback video.
[01:39:29]  I guess that is, I have seen it, his yeah, I mean, it's extremely like, sit down, chuckle fucks, like vibe.
[01:39:37]  And it's like a 21-minute YouTube video, which is far too long for a YouTube video.
[01:39:42]  They get way longer than that, Liz.
[01:39:44]  And he like brings his receipts, but it's funny because he presents his, you know, he presents all these, like all these quotes and he's like, no, this is what I said.
[01:39:52]  And it's a tape of, you know, what he said to the New York.
[01:39:55]  And he's like, they took it out of context, fa-da-da-da-da-da-da.
[01:39:58]  And he's, you know, saying all this stuff.
[01:40:00]  And, you know, you brought up Janet Malcolm.
[01:40:03]  And this, watching this clapback video, if we want to like, again, bring it all the way back around before we sign off, is like watching a subject of a takedown piece about whether or not they were true or false remembering so much of the journalists and the murderer and watching a subject take issue with this with the kind of,
[01:40:25]  I don't know, unstable or the kind of sense of betrayal that he felt at how his words were being taken out, that how his truth was being taken out of context by the journalist.
[01:40:37]  It was like so many, it was like almost like too looping for me to kind of get my head around.
[01:40:44]  But I think is really indicative of the kind of, you know, people like the idea that if you're, you know, they're just saying your story, that that's like the end-all be-all.
[01:40:58]  And it's just like maybe not as stable of a narrative position as maybe people think it is.
[01:41:03]  It's not.
[01:41:04]  And I think, you know, in relation to all of these different things, The memoirist and Hassan Minaj.
[01:41:13]  One thing that I've always been firmly a believer of is that, like, if you're funny enough and you can replace funny with whatever like talent that you would need to be one of these memoirists, though, I think that's a little bit different.
[01:41:27]  But like with Minaj in particular, you know, like if you're like being, if you're a comedian, being funny should be your absolute primary goal.
[01:41:37]  Truth telling, if we're talking Arnold Palmer's here, like that should be like, it should be like 70% funny, 80% funny, 20% truth-telling.
[01:41:46]  Because when those ratios get reversed or lopsided in some way, you end up being someone who needs to tell the truth.
[01:41:54]  Because if you're a truth teller, it needs to be truthful.
[01:41:58]  You've lost the jester's privilege.
[01:41:59]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:42:00]  You've lost the jester's privilege.
[01:42:02]  And, you know, I think it should be a cautionary tale.
[01:42:06]  No.
[01:42:07]  You know, it's, I know, I saw the PTSD flicker into your eyes with that one.
[01:42:13]  It should be a cautionary tale because it's like, it's, don't get, I mean, that's all this shit, man.
[01:42:18]  Don't get fucking lost in the sauce.
[01:42:20]  You know?
[01:42:20]  Well, if you're going to stick your neck out so far and be a moral arbiter for something, you have to have every, you know, every screw-in, every nail like filed down, smooth to the surface, flush.
[01:42:31]  You cannot have anything that people can attack you with.
[01:42:34]  You know, you have to have your thing.
[01:42:36]  Right.
[01:42:37]  And so don't, don't assert yourself as a fucking moral arbiter, you know?
[01:42:41]  Or I mean, this is not you.
[01:42:43]  I'm sorry.
[01:42:43]  No, this one.
[01:42:44]  I don't think I do, but no, exactly.
[01:42:46]  Like, you know, do the work, you know?
[01:42:49]  Of being funny.
[01:42:50]  Right?
[01:42:51]  Because if they're funny, start letting you do it.
[01:42:53]  Yeah.
[01:42:53]  My question is, I'm just like, how do these guys have all these good memories, man?
[01:42:57]  Like, I can't remember what that teacher said to me ever, you know, besides just you're not that good at math.
[01:43:05]  But you know what?
[01:43:06]  I guess that's why I'll never be a memoirist.
[01:43:09]  You start with the gist of it and then you just make shit up.
[01:43:11]  I guess that's true.
[01:43:12]  Yeah.
[01:43:12]  Yeah.
[01:43:13]  Keep the gist alive, though.
[01:43:15]  I mean, you know, Pelzer pulls from people who could basically discredit him to make his testimonials at the end of his books.
[01:43:26]  And it's interesting reading them because I, you know, I keep talking about like this idea that there's that the story he's avoiding telling is that he was a bit of a bad kid and like more than a bit of a bad kid, like a juvenile delinquent.
[01:43:37]  Yeah.
[01:43:38]  Like he's constantly making really passing references to stealing shit, to setting things on fire, to almost hitting like little girls in his neighborhood, to breaking things, to like launching his like motorcycle through a neighbor's like garden and shit like this.
[01:43:54]  And then being kind of like surprised when he sort of gets in trouble with it.
[01:43:59]  And to me, what is kind of like a weird kind of almost tragic element to the story is that it wouldn't have hurt a child called it and it wouldn't have hurt its reception or anything if he was like, he was like, oh yeah, I kind of, you know, I was here in part of this too.
[01:44:19]  Like, and my mom, my mom went, my mom went fucking crazy with it and I drove her a little crazy and like, but she went completely out of control and these kind of things can happen.

=== Surprising Reprisal and Vindictiveness (05:53) ===

[01:44:28]  Yeah.
[01:44:28]  That he has to, like, he is sanitizing himself throughout the fucking story and is never, never in the wrong, is always surrounded by idiots, you know, idiots and arrogant people who think less of him.
[01:44:40]  And he always gets the last word.
[01:44:41]  He always, you know, has the perfect fucking put down at the end.
[01:44:45]  Even at 12, we, you know, we discussed his psychologist.
[01:44:50]  Yeah.
[01:44:51]  But even, you know, even the people he pulls for testimonials will reference.
[01:44:57]  They were like, yeah, he was a wild kid.
[01:44:59]  And like, I'm glad he got his shit together and stuff like that.
[01:45:02]  And he goes to a psychologist who's depicted as this just like cartoon 1950s like post-Freudian analyst kind of like with the couch and all that, who was like, you need to, you know, shape up and fly right, et cetera.
[01:45:16]  It's a very Jewish voice.
[01:45:19]  And he's also worried that like the Air Force is going to find out about his past.
[01:45:23]  And in each of those cases, you're like, well, wait, like you're like, why do you need to shape up if you were a perfect kid who was getting hit?
[01:45:31]  Like, why was it a question?
[01:45:34]  You know, like, why would the Air Force have not let you in because your mom beat you?
[01:45:38]  You know, it's like, there's something missing here.
[01:45:41]  And it seems to come from a place of like, I mean, he even, it's funny too, because he, speaking of tells, there's a proviso at the beginning of the third book that specifically says, this book is not under any circumstances meant to be used as a reprisal or an opportunity to be vindictive, but rather to serve a purpose of what transpires in my life and the valuable lessons learned.
[01:46:04]  It's obviously a reprisal and vindictive.
[01:46:07]  He's just, he's character assassinating people who are who are dead out of touch with him or soon will be.
[01:46:14]  And he's painting them as complete monsters with very little saving grace, you know?
[01:46:22]  And he's no longer doing this from the view of a child.
[01:46:24]  He's doing this from, like, from the view of a 20-year-old, right?
[01:46:39]  I feel like there's, like, a breakdown in, like, in the late 20th century of the ideas of trust and believability.
[01:46:49]  And it's nothing new.
[01:46:49]  You know, literary hoaxes go back like to the printing press and before.
[01:46:55]  Sure.
[01:46:56]  and fake memoirs, as said, have just kind of come and gone by the dozen and some have worked and some haven't.
[01:47:04]  Memoirs are overwhelmingly or fake memoirs are overwhelmingly responsible for massive movements.
[01:47:10]  And in recent years, like the Satanic Panic and stuff like that was all based around Michelle Remembers and Satan's Underground, which were just straight made up and cost a lot of people lives and freedom and communities and things of this nature.
[01:47:26]  And it's funny that at the birth of the internet, which is finally sort of revealing its face as this disinformation accelerator, this thing that puts insane truth to Mark Twain's axiom that a lie will be halfway around the world by the time the truth puts its shoes on, that we had this rush in our culture of the last of the great traditional print hoax people.
[01:47:56]  I like that.
[01:47:57]  I'll take it.
[01:47:59]  But of a kind, right?
[01:48:01]  Because now because of, you know, in the age of the internet and social media, I think that, and I think this is part of Minhaj's gambit, is sort of like there is a sense of like, well, don't we all kind of do this?
[01:48:16]  Right.
[01:48:16]  And like, isn't all fiction kind of autofiction?
[01:48:19]  And isn't all autofiction kind of fiction?
[01:48:22]  You know what I mean?
[01:48:23]  Like, there is a lot of, everything is very porous now.
[01:48:27]  Right.
[01:48:27]  And people are much more comfortable up until they aren't, I think, up until they decide they don't want to be with the very sort of, I mean, it's so corny, but to like cite it again, but like with Stephen Colbert's like truthiness.
[01:48:45]  Yeah.
[01:48:45]  Like and his sort of, when he came out with that as his kind of diagnosis of the like cultural age or whatever, whatever.
[01:48:57]  But that that was kind of like a smeared, something kind of smeared out, that we're all sort of okay with everyone.
[01:49:05]  It's not lying, but it's not totally embellishing.
[01:49:07]  But yeah, it's like we're smearing ourselves out in service of, I don't know, personal brand or getting yours or getting famous on YouTube or publishing a book or whatever it is.
[01:49:23]  I think the way it's funny, like it manifests now in like these sort of like, there was like the sort of confessional website stuff, you know, of like, you know, the blog era, I guess, kind of up until a few years ago.
[01:49:36]  And it was like a big problem.
[01:49:37]  I remember reading, I can't, I could try to find it the other day, but reading this like sort of confessional about confessionals from somebody who worked for like bitch media or one of these like babe.net or one of those things about like working at these things and having to kind of Write about trauma and then kind of like having to like running out and like having to kind of like put some more down because that was like the content kind of game or like Tramarama in 17 magazine.
[01:50:03]  A little more later than that, but yeah, it's essentially kind of similar.
[01:50:09]  And now it's like, you know, I'm reminded of like people posting like things from like the subreddit, Am I the asshole on Twitter or whatever, and being like, you know, look at this jerk.
[01:50:17]  And it's just, yeah, it's, people never get tired of it.
[01:50:20]  Well, we, we have to wrap up.

=== Blog Era Confessions (01:16) ===

[01:50:22]  Right.
[01:50:23]  And I guess my advice to the audience would be: don't write a memoir.
[01:50:28]  We're over it.
[01:50:29]  We're over it.
[01:50:29]  I'm done reading the memoirs.
[01:50:31]  Your personal essay is a memoir.
[01:50:33]  Don't do that either.
[01:50:34]  Yeah, it's a little memoir.
[01:50:35]  Let's tell you this: why don't you try writing a beautiful novel?
[01:50:39]  Yeah, we'll see you in 30 years.
[01:50:40]  Write an 800-page novel about the Holocaust.
[01:50:43]  You know what I'm talking about here?
[01:50:44]  Just make it good.
[01:50:45]  If it's good, make it good.
[01:50:46]  Yeah, make it good.
[01:50:47]  And if it's good enough, say it's nonfiction.
[01:50:49]  Right?
[01:50:50]  You know what?
[01:50:51]  If it's good enough, say it's nonfiction.
[01:50:53]  If your story's funny enough, say it's a comedy album.
[01:50:57]  With that being said, my name is A Child Called It, Brace Belden, joined by Liz, of course, producer Young Chomsky.
[01:51:07]  The podcast is called Truanon.
[01:51:09]  And we'd like to thank you.
[01:51:10]  Thomas, do you have any plug?
[01:51:13]  Nothing yet.
[01:51:14]  Okay.
[01:51:14]  Not much.
[01:51:15]  Well, if you are, if you ever get stoned and look at YouTube, there's about 800 documentaries that Thomas has done.
[01:51:21]  Oh, Christ.
[01:51:22]  Yeah, you can, you, you, you know, you can see the heroin one I like a lot.
[01:51:28]  The one in Prague, outside Prague, in the Poppy Fields.
[01:51:31]  I love that one.
[01:51:32]  Yeah, that was great.
[01:51:33]  It was a Kublai con to me.
[01:51:34]  Indeed.
[01:51:35]  And the podcast is called.
[01:51:37]  True Anon.
[01:51:38]  We'll see you next time.